A
prominent encyclopedia has suggested that the invention with the greatest
impact on worldwide economic life since the railroad is, no, you’d never guess,
the refrigerator! Isn’t the refrigerator more of a convenience item? Hardly.
Refrigeration technology has completely revolutionized farming and led to the
rapid development of a worldwide food trade. It would be difficult indeed to
find a person in the world today who has not benefited in some way from the
introduction of refrigerated food preservation.
The growth of cities and suburbs in the last century has
steadily moved most of us further and further away from our food source, the
farm. Without food-preservation techniques, especially refrigeration, it’s
doubtful that this urban growth could have moved ahead so rapidly. And since
the advent of refrigeration, a nation no longer has to feed itself, the
abundant supply of one nation can balance the scarcity in another, allowing
many nations to industrialize more quickly. Improved food preservation has also
helped increase the world’s food supply by eliminating much waste. Foods that
would otherwise perish can remain in storage until needed.
Refrigeration may be a recent advance, but food
preservation itself has engaged man’s attention since the beginning of time.
Cheese and butter may, in a sense, be regarded as preserved milk; wine, as
preserved grapes. For thousands of years, meat and fish have been preserved by
salting or drying, or more recently, by curing with sugar or nitrate compounds.
Most of these early stratagems were discovered by chance, they worked, but no
one knew why. Only when the existence of bacteria and their influence on
foodstuffs became known, could man begin to deal adequately with food
preservation.
Without bacteria, edibles would last almost indefinitely.
All food-preservation techniques, then, are designed to kill or limit the
growth of bacterial life. For instance, the process of drying works because
bacteria cannot grow in the absence of moisture. Sterilization by heat,
cooking, will completely destroy bacterial life, but the effects are temporary.
Cooked food will spoil as rapidly as uncooked food if left untreated or
uneaten.
Cooling does not kill bacteria, but it does stop their
growth. Once scientists learned that most bacteria cannot grow at temperatures
below the freezing point of water, and also that long-term freezing or cooling
of foods does not influence their nutritional content, they knew what was
needed for the perfect food-preservation system, a refrigerator. It remained
only to invent one.
It had long been known that low temperatures would, for
some then unknown reason, preserve food. People in Arctic lands often stored
their meat in snow and ice. But to preserve food, people in warmer climes
needed man-made ice.
Ancient Indians made ice the simplest and least
dependable way possible, leaving water in special outdoor receptacles
overnight. The ancient Romans cooled their wine cellars with snow brought from
nearby mountains. They also discovered, as did the Indians, that water could be
cooled with the addition of saltpeter. The Romans sometimes chilled liquids by
immersing bottles in vessels filled with water and saltpeter, and rotating the
bottles rapidly. The records of a Roman doctor, Blasius Villafranca, show that
cooling water with saltpeter was still common in the sixteenth century.
Primitive cooling techniques could chill food and drink,
but not freeze them; the beneficial effects were temporary. During the 18th
century, many scientists developed an interest in mechanical refrigeration, but
with neither electricity not the means to manufacture large quantities of ice,
the scientist’s road to the new “ice age” was a long and difficult one.
The first “refrigerator” in the United States was
invented in 1803 by Thomas Moore of Baltimore, but Moore’s machine was really a
“thermos” device, two boxes, one inside the other, with insulating material in
between. Food stored with ice in the inner box would remain cool for a time,
but not cool enough to inhibit bacterial growth for very long.
The next giant step toward successful refrigeration came
in 1834, when Jacob Perkins, an American living in England, developed an
ice-making machine functioning on the compression principle. Gases subjected to
high pressures will remain in the liquid state at temperatures beyond their
normal boiling point. Perkins showed that when these compressed liquids were
used as refrigerants, they would absorb a great deal of heat before changing to
the gaseous state.
In 1851, an American engineer named John Gorrie took
Perkins’ techniques one step further, filing a patent for “an improvement in
the process for the artificial production of ice.” Gorrie stunned a dinner
crowd by exhibiting blocks of man-made ice the size of bricks. Gorrie’s
compression-principle machine failed as a dependable refrigerator for a number
of reasons, but his primitive machine formed the basis of much later work.
The 1870′s saw vast improvements in refrigeration
techniques. A refrigerator car, really a rolling icebox, had made its earliest
appearance in 1851, when several tons of butter made the journey by rail from
Ogdensburg, New York to Boston. But the first application of refrigeration
technology to marine food transportation came in 1880, when the steamer
Strathleven carried a meat cargo from Australia to England. Oddly enough, the
meat was meant to be cooled, not frozen, but freezing did take place, and the
excellent results led to the subsequent freezing of all meat cargoes.
The domestic refrigerator was not to be used on any scale
until this century. In the past, urban Europeans had often hung dairy products
out the window to keep them cool for a time. The larder was also used
throughout the West for temporary preservation. Earlier in this century, most
American homes relied on the icebox for their victuals. The icebox, however,
left much to be desired, especially when the iceman did not cometh.
The modern domestic refrigerator is based to a great
extent on the work of the Frenchman Edmond Cane. In the 1830′s, Carre perfected
the first refrigerating machine to be widely adopted for individual use.
Carre’s machines were used in many Paris restaurants for the production of ice
and ice cream products. The first household refrigerator patent in the United
States was granted in 1899 to one Albert T. Marshall of Brockton,
Massachusetts.
Modern refrigerators and freezers use a circulating
refrigerant that continually changes from the gaseous to the liquid state. Most
machines use dichlordifluoromethane and other refrigerants mercifully known
under the trade name of Freon. The liquid refrigerant changes to a gas in the
evaporator, then absorbs heat from the food chamber and carries it to the
condensing coils, where the refrigerant is cooled by air passing over the
coils, and is reconverted into liquid. The cycle is then repeated, spurred on
periodically by a small electric motor. Incidentally, your refrigerator is
probably your greatest electricity consumer, after your air conditioner.
Wartime restrictions limited the growth of the domestic
refrigerator in this country, but after World War II the ‘fridge found its way
into almost every American home, and so did frozen foods. The American,
Clarence Birdseye, is responsible for the development of methods for freezing
foods in small packages for the retail trade. The General Foods Corporation
introduced the now familiar Birds Eye commercial pack in 1929. Since then, the
use of frozen foods has grown with the refrigerator. As early as 1944,
Americans were consuming some three billion pounds of frozen meats, vegetables,
fruits, fish, and dairy products each year.
During and after World War II, military and industrial
research led to the development of the science of cryogenics, the study of
matter at extremely low temperatures. Basically, cryogenics, from the Greek
word kryos, “icy cold”, deals with the production of temperatures below that of
liquid oxygen (-297 degrees F.). You hardly need such frigid temperatures to
keep your eggs fresh, but cryogenic engineering has had an impact on many elements
of modern life, from medicine to space travel.
Scientists have been freely discussing the ultimate
cryogenic marvel, suspended animation. Living organisms, including man, can
theoretically be kept in a deep freeze almost indefinitely, and resume normal
life functions upon thawing. Persons with presently incurable diseases could be
frozen before death in the hope of reviving them when cures are found.
Intergalactic space travelers could be frozen and revived upon reaching their
destination thousands of years later. And think of the possibility of a living
time capsule, a human being frozen for thousands of years, to be resurrected by
some future civilization to see how we lived in the twentieth century!
Coolaire Consolidated, Inc. is
your partner in refrigeration. We value customer relationships and make our
best effort to be there when needed, even after we close a sale. Indeed figures
matter but we also put a high premium on client management. It is already our
habit to reach out even to a fault occasionally.
I find this very interesting blog that shows the refrigeration history.
ReplyDeleteIt's very important to recognize each of these elements and the refrigerant in the history cycle to thereby be able to analyze the status and possible failures, modifications and changes that may occur during maintenance.
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