Posted on 06/05/2022 6:18:00 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The first form of artificial refrigeration was invented by William Cullen, a Scottish scientist. Cullen showed how the rapid heating of liquid to a gas can result in cooling. This is the principle behind refrigeration that still remains today. Cullen never turned his theory into practice, but many were inspired to try to realize his idea.
(Excerpt) Read more at materials.sandvik ...
Artificial Refrigeration and the Architecture of 19th-century American Breweries | Susan K. Appel | IA. The Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeology | Vol. 16, No. 1 (1990)
The Scots saved the world
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.)
they did it for cold beer,,,,
I learned about John Gorrie from that good documentary Connections by that James Burke fellow.
German lager beer came to America with the German immigrants in the 1840s, tasting a lot better than American ale. Refrigeration enabled the breweries to make a uniform product all year round. Brewing was the first activity in the northern states to use mechanical refrigeration extensively, beginning with an absorption machine used by S. Liebmann�s Sons Brewing Company in Brooklyn, New York in 1870. Commercial refrigeration was primarily directed at breweries in the 1870s and by 1891, nearly every brewery was equipped with refrigerating machines.The Impact of Refrigeration | Barbara Krasner-Khait
Heh, that’s what got me started thinking about doing a topic about this. Link in previous reply.
Why is it called “Refrigeration” and not just “Frigeration”?
The prefix “Re” means “back, back from, back to the original place” or “again, anew, once more.”
So what happened to the Frigeration the first time through? Why are we RE-frigerating things?
James Burkes Connections I would give 100% credit for my turning from a what-the-heck teenager to somewhat academic thirst for knowledge in general.
Connections was a great series.
I carried that book around in high school. The history teacher wasn’t pleased.
Similar here.
My mom, born in 1918, used to talk about how they loved when the ice truck came. He would carve off blocks of ice to fit in the ice boxes at each home (which he knew by memory). But the kids would crowd around and of course he would make “mistakes” in his cuts and end up with some extra pieces of chipped ice that the kids would gather up.
“It was really the only time on a hot day that you could actually have anything that was REALLY cold. We didn’t waste ice on cold drinks, and the ice box kept things cool - but it was mostly for keeping food cold. Drinks were kept down in the root cellar.”
Her favorite though was the sheeny man (or rag man) who still used a horse to scrounge for old rags, clothing, metal, etc. She loved the horse!
Perhaps because it is in a closed loop - so is re-circulating and you re-cool the hot air??? (I have no idea, just a guess!)
One of my pet peeves (although I often call it that myself) is the “hot water heater”.
It’s the rapid depressurization that brings about a cooling effect. Who wrote this?
A lot of pure research got done a looong time ago, leading to discoveries and inventions, including thermocouples (Alessandro Volta in 1794, Thomas Johann Seebeck in 1821), solid state refrigeration (Jean Charles Athanase Peltier in 1834), photovoltaics (Edmond Becquerel in 1839), piezoelectricity (Carl Linnaeus and Franz Aepinus, mid-18th century), the Otto cycle (Nicolaus Otto, 1861, named for him but based on earlier work), and superconductivity (Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in 1911).
“I’m refinishing this table.”
“Don’t you have to re-start?” — George Carlin
And this was our TV.
Good days!
My dad loved to fix things and get gadgets going for years and years and years.
Back then my mom invented the first TV remote to change channels for her .... her kids!
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