Harvesting of ice was difficult and dangerous so people tried to invent artificial ways of refrigeration. The first one to make a breakthrough was Scottish professor William Cullen who designed a small refrigerating machine in 1755. He used a pump to create a partial vacuum over a container of diethyl ether. Ether boiled and absorbed the heat from the surrounding air. This resulted in a small amount of ice, but machine was not practical at that time. Benjamin Franklin and John Hadley experimented with refrigeration in 1758. They experimented with the bulb of a mercury thermometer and concluded that the evaporation of liquids such as alcohol and ether could be used to lower the temperature of an object below the freezing point of water. American Oliver Evans designed refrigerator in 1805 which was based on a closed cycle of compressed ether. Design stayed in prototype stage. John Gorrie built a similar machine in 1844 and it used compressed air. Alexander Twinning began selling a refrigeration machine based on this principle in 1856 while Australian James Harrison enlarged this design and adapted it for meat-packing and beer-making industries. Ferdinand Carre introduced ammonia as a coolant in 1859 but it had bad smell and was poisonous when it leaked so it wasn’t used for long.History of Refrigeration and Refrigerators
(btw, I once looked at a house which had a left-behind fridge that still used sulfur dioxide, which antedated Freon.)
I learned about John Gorrie from that good documentary Connections by that James Burke fellow.
“(btw, I once looked at a house which had a left-behind fridge that still used sulfur dioxide, which antedated Freon.)”
Now they use Propane, which is going to explode, and WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!
(actually Propane is an excellent refrigerant and mix it with Butane in the proper proportion and you have a perfect drop-in replacement for R-12)
Although it is. Anhydrous ammonia is widely used as refrigerant in industrial facilities such as: