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!
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
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?
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!
It’s the rapid depressurization that brings about a cooling effect. Who wrote this?
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!
“how the rapid heating of liquid to a gas can result in cooling.”
Holy cow! That’s not at all how refrigeration works.
Lots of replies, but not much substance.
My mother told me how the Iceman would spend all winter chopping ice from the lake and bury it,
Then in the summer he would deliver pieces daily like the milkman.
Before freon they used ammonia, and it worked well.
And there were sterling engines too.
This is just in recent history
Mama grew up with an Ice Box.
We always called it an ‘ice box’. (I was raised by folks who grew up with only those.)
I grew up calling it the icebox as that is what mom called it.
We had an old fashioned refrigerator, short with rounded edges. Ipana written on it. Mom kept the radio on top and for some reason as a pretty young kid I used to climb on top and look out the window and listen to that radio. Old am station. I remember a news story about a person who was being kept locked in a room and watched by the priests because they were supposedly possessed by the devil. Words across their chest would form, backwards. I’ve always thought this was the story that was famously used for the book, The Exorcist...
My grandparents used to call their Fridgedaire “the icebox”
Born in Canada, in my early years I remember the iceman delivering blocks of ice for our refrigerator ... in the warmer summer months. The ice block was placed on a shelf on the top of the refrigerator with a tray below it to catch the melting ice. The ice was typically cut from nearby lake or river in the winter months and placed in ice sheds ... kept from melting by being covered with sawdust usually from a local sawmill. In the warmer months the ice blocks were retrieved from the ice sheds, the sawdust sprayed off and the ice delivered to customers.
When I was just a little fella (maybe 4-5 years old), I’d sometimes go with my dad and the other men that were members of the ice co-op to harvest ice.
They’d build a huge bonfire on the bank of the lake where they heated up these long, pointed I-bolts. They’d lay out 4’ squares on the ice surface and then plunge those red-hot I-bolts down a center hole they chiseled, and let em freeze in overnight. The next day, they took what appeared to be a long-bar chainsaw and would cut those 4’ blocks out of lake ice that was 4-5’ thick. They’d snatch onto the I-bolt with a chain hooked up to a team of work horses that would then pull that block completely out of the lake. They skidded those blocks with that horse team up into an old barn they called the “Ice House”. Once full, they buried those big blocks with sawdust from the sawmill down the road.
The Ice Man would carve out 1’ blocks from the Ice House and bring em to town every Thursday. My mother would send me and my little radio-flyer wagon down the hill with a nickel to buy a block for the ice box. She’d always tell me, and I can still hear her now: “Don’t you dilly-dally, young man. You get right back up here with that block as fast as you can.” I’d go down there, pay the guy, and he’d put the block on the wagon. I’d quickly cover it with some old burlap and blankets, and then head back up the hill where my mom would load it into the Ice Box.
I believe it was 1956 when my dad purchased a GE refrigerator. He was told not to open the door for 24 hours after he plugged it in...no one knew why...LOL. We were all standing there as he plugged it in. That old-style compressor came on and was so loud, we thought it was gonna explode so we all ran out of the house!!! We waited a good while, it didn’t explode so we went back in.
Man, time flies...seems like yesterday.
Of course my gandfther, born in the 1800s, always called an automobile a "machine". He'd say "Get into the machine, and we will go for ice cream.".
Now post about the Einstein refrigerator (no joke) which uses no electricity.
I think Electrolux holds the patent.
It’s not ‘rapid heating of a liquid’, it’s rapid EXPANSION of a gas under pressure. That’s called adiabatic expansion.
The Secret Life of Machines. Here is the "refrigerator" episode ...