History
The seasonal harvesting of snow and ice is an ancient practice estimated to have begun earlier than 1000 BC. A Chinese collection of lyrics from this time period call as the Shijing, describes religious ceremonies for filling and emptying ice cellars. However, little is known about the construction of these ice cellars or the aim of the ice. The next ancient society to record the harvesting of ice may have been the Jews in the book of Proverbs, which reads, “As the cold of snow in the time of harvest, so is a faithful messenger to them who listed him.” Historians have interpreted this to mean that the Jews used ice to cool beverages rather than to preserve food. Other ancient cultures such as the Greeks and the Romans dug large snow pits insulated with grass, chaff, or branches of trees as cold storage. Like the Jews, the Greeks and Romans did not ownership ice and snow to preserve food, but primarily as a means to cool beverages. The Egyptians also developed methods to cool beverages, but in lieu of using ice to cool water, the Egyptians cooled water by putting boiling water in shallow earthen jars and placing them on the roofs of their houses at night. Wind would moisten the external of the jars and the resulting evaporation would cool the water. The ancient people of India used this same concept to produce ice. The Persians stored ice in a pit called a Yakhchal and may have been the first combine of people to use cold storage to preserve food. In the Australian outback before a reliable electricity render was usable where the weather could be hot and dry, many farmers used a Coolgardie safe. This consisted of a room with hessian burlap curtains hanging from the ceiling soaked in water. The water would evaporate and thereby cool the hessian curtains and thereby the air circulating in the room. This would allow many perishables such as fruit, butter, and cured meats to be kept that would commonly spoil in the heat.
Before 1830, few Americans used ice to refrigerate foods due to a lack of ice-storehouses and iceboxes. As these two matters became more widely available, individuals used axes and saws to harvest ice for their storehouses. This method proved to be difficult, dangerous, and certainly did non resemble anything that could be duplicated on a commercial scale.
Despite the difficulties of harvesting ice, Frederic Tudor thought that he could capitalize on this new commodity by harvesting ice in New England and shipping it to the Caribbean islands as well as the southern states. In the beginning, Tudor lost thousands of dollars, but eventually turned a profit as he constructed icehouses in Charleston, Virginia and in the Cuban port town of Havana. These icehouses as well as better insulated ships helped reduce ice wastage from 66% to 8%. This efficiency gain influenced Tudor to expand his ice market to other towns with icehouses such as New Orleans and Savannah. This ice market further expanded as harvesting ice became faster and cheaper after one of Tudor's suppliers, Nathaniel Wyeth, invented a horse-drawn ice cutter in 1825. This invention as well as Tudor's success inspired others to receive involved in the ice trade and the ice industry grew.
Ice became a mass-market commodity by the early 1830s with the price of ice dropping from six cents per pound to a half of a cent per pound. In New York City, ice consumption increased from 12,000 tons in 1843 to 100,000 tons in 1856. Boston's consumption leapt from 6,000 tons to 85,000 tons during that same period. Ice harvesting created a “cooling culture” as majority of people used ice and iceboxes to store their dairy products, fish, meat, and even fruits and vegetables. These early cold storage practices paved the way for many Americans to accept the refrigeration engineering that would soon take over the country.
The history of artificial refrigeration began when Scottish professor William Cullen designed a small refrigerating machine in 1755. Cullen used a pump to create a partial vacuum over a container of diethyl ether, which then boiled, absorbing heat from the surrounding air. The experiment even created a small amount of ice, but had no practical application at that time.
In 1758, Oliver Evans transmitted a closed vapor-compression refrigeration cycle for the production of ice by ether under vacuum.
In 1820 the English scientist Michael Faraday liquefied ammonia and other gases by using high pressures and low temperatures, and in 1834, an American expatriate to Great Britain, Jacob Perkins, built the first working vapor-compression refrigeration system in the world. It was a closed-cycle that could operate continuously, as he described in his patent:
His prototype system worked although it did not succeed commercially.
In 1842, a similar attempt was made by American physician, John Gorrie, who built a working prototype, but it was a commercial failure. Like many of the medical experts during this time, Gorrie thought too much exposure to tropical heat led to mental and physical degeneration, as well as the spread of diseases such as malaria. He conceived the impression of using his refrigeration system to cool the air for comfort in homes and hospitals to prevent disease. American engineer Alexander Twining took out a British patent in 1850 for a vapour compression system that used ether.
The first practical vapour-compression refrigeration system was built by James Harrison, a British journalist who had emigrated to Australia. His 1856 patent was for a vapour-compression system using ether, alcohol, or ammonia. He built a mechanical ice-making machine in 1851 on the banks of the Barwon River at Rocky bit in Geelong, Victoria, and his number one commercial ice-making machine followed in 1854. Harrison also offered commercial vapour-compression refrigeration to breweries and meat-packing houses, and by 1861, a dozen of his systems were in operation. He later entered the debate of how to compete against the American good of unrefrigerated beef sales to the United Kingdom. In 1873 he prepared the sailing ship Norfolk for an experimental beef shipment to the United Kingdom, which used a cold room system instead of a refrigeration system. The venture was a failure as the ice was consumed faster than expected.
The first gas absorption refrigeration system using gaseous ammonia dissolved in water referred to as "aqua ammonia" was developed by Ferdinand Carré of France in 1859 and patented in 1860. Carl von Linde, an engineer specializing in steam locomotives and professor of engineering at the Technological University of Munich in Germany, began researching refrigeration in the 1860s and 1870s in response to demand from brewers for a technology that would permit year-round, large-scale production of lager; he patented an enhancement method of liquefying gases in 1876. His new process made possible using gases such as ammonia, sulfur dioxide SO2 and methyl chloride CH3Cl as refrigerants and they were widely used for that purpose until the slow 1920s.
Thaddeus Lowe, an American balloonist, held several patents on ice-making machines. His "Compression Ice Machine" would revolutionize the cold-storage industry. In 1869 other investors and he purchased an old steamship onto which they loaded one of Lowe's refrigeration units and began shipping fresh fruit from New York to the Gulf cruise area, and fresh meat from Galveston, Texas back to New York, but because of Lowe's lack of cognition about shipping, the group was a costly failure.
In 1842 John Gorrie created a system capable of refrigerating water to produce ice. Although it was a commercial failure, it inspired scientists and inventors around the world. France's Ferdinand Carre was one of the inspired and he created an ice producing system that was simpler and smaller than that of Gorrie. During the Civil War, cities such as New Orleans could no longer get ice from New England via the coastal ice trade. Carre's refrigeration system became the sum to New Orleans ice problems and by 1865 the city had three of Carre's machines. In 1867, in San Antonio, Texas, a French immigrant named Andrew Muhl built an ice-making machine to support service the expanding beef industry previously moving it to Waco in 1871. In 1873, the patent for this machine was contracted by the Columbus Iron Works, a organization acquired by the W.C. Bradley Co., which went on to produce the first commercial ice-makers in the US.
By the 1870s breweries had become the largest users of harvested ice. Though the ice-harvesting industry had grown immensely by the adjust of the 20th century, pollution and sewage had begun to creep into natural ice, creating it a problem in the metropolitan suburbs. Eventually, breweries began to complain of tainted ice. Public concern for the purity of water, from which ice was formed, began to increase in the early 1900s with the rise of germ theory. Numerous media outlets published articles connecting diseases such as typhoid fever with natural ice consumption. This caused ice harvesting to become illegal inareas of the country. all of these scenarios increased the demands for modern refrigeration and manufactured ice. Ice producing machines like that of Carre's and Muhl's were looked to as means of producing ice to meet the needs of grocers, farmers, and food shippers.
Refrigerated railroad cars were introduced in the US in the 1840s for short-run transport of dairy products, but these used harvested ice to sustains a cool temperature.
The new refrigerating technology first met with widespread industrial use as a means to freeze meat supplies for transport by sea in reefer ships from the British Dominions and other countries to the British Isles. Although not actually the first tosuccessful transportation of frozen goods overseas the Strathleven had arrived at the London docks on 2 February 1880 with a cargo of frozen beef, mutton and butter from Sydney and Melbourne , the breakthrough is often attributed to William Soltau Davidson, an entrepreneur who had emigrated to New Zealand. Davidson thought that Britain's rising population and meat demand could mitigate the slump in world wool markets that was heavily affecting New Zealand. After extensive research, he commissioned the Dunedin to be refitted with a compression refrigeration detail for meat shipment in 1881. On February 15, 1882, the Dunedin sailed for London with what was to be the first commercially successful refrigerated shipping voyage, and the foundation of the refrigerated meat industry.
The Times commented "Today we have to record such a triumph over physical difficulties, as would have been incredible, even unimaginable, a very few days ago...". The Marlborough—sister ship to the Dunedin – was immediately converted and joined the trade the coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. year, along with the rival New Zealand Shipping Company vessel Mataurua, while the German Steamer Marsala began carrying frozen New Zealand lamb in December 1882. Within five years, 172 shipments of frozen meat were sent from New Zealand to the United Kingdom, of which only 9 had significant amounts of meat condemned. Refrigerated shipping also led to a broader meat and dairy boom in Australasia and South America. J & E Hall of Dartford, England outfitted the 'SS Selembria' with a vapor compression system to bring 30,000 carcasses of mutton from the Falkland Islands in 1886. In the years ahead, the industry rapidly expanded to Australia, Argentina and the United States.
By the 1890s refrigeration played a vital role in the distribution of food. The meat-packing industry relied heavily on natural ice in the 1880s and continued to rely on manufactured ice as those technologies became available. By 1900, the meat-packing houses of Chicago had adopted ammonia-cycle commercial refrigeration. By 1914 almost every location used artificial refrigeration. The major meat packers, Armour, Swift, and Wilson, had purchased the most expensive units which they installed on train cars and in branch houses and storage facilities in the more remote distribution areas.
By the middle of the 20th century, refrigeration units were designed for installation on trucks or lorries. Refrigerated vehicles are used to transport perishable goods, such as frozen foods, fruit and vegetables, and temperature-sensitive chemicals. Most modern refrigerators keep the temperature between –40 and –20 °C, and have a maximum payload of around 24,000 kg gross weight in Europe.
Although commercial refrigeration quickly progressed, it had limitations that prevented it from moving into the household. First, most refrigerators were far too large. Some of the commercial units being used in 1910 weighed between five and two hundred tons. Second, commercial refrigerators were expensive to produce, purchase, and maintain. Lastly, these refrigerators were unsafe. It was not uncommon for commercial refrigerators to catch fire, explode, or leak toxic gases. Refrigeration did not become a household technology until these three challenges were overcome.
During the early 1800s consumers preserved their food by storing food and ice purchased from ice harvesters in iceboxes. In 1803, Thomas Moore patented a metal-lined butter-storage tub which became the prototype for most iceboxes. These iceboxes were used until nearly 1910 and the technology did not progress. In fact, consumers that used the icebox in 1910 faced the same challenge of a moldy and stinky icebox that consumers had in the early 1800s.
General Electric GE was one of the first companies to overcome these challenges. In 1911 GE released a household refrigeration unit that was powered by gas. The use of gas eliminated the need for an electric compressor motor and decreased the size of the refrigerator. However, electric companies that were customers of GE did not advantage from a gas-powered unit. Thus, GE invested in developing an electric model. In 1927, GE released the Monitor Top, the first refrigerator to run on electricity.
In 1930, Frigidaire, one of GE's leading competitors, synthesized Freon. With the invention of synthetic refrigerants based mostly on a chlorofluorocarbon CFC chemical, safer refrigerators were possible for domestic and consumer use. Freon led to the development of smaller, lighter, and cheaper refrigerators. The average price of a refrigerator dropped from $275 to $154 with the synthesis of Freon. This lower price provides ownership of refrigerators in American households to exceed 50% by 1940. Freon is a trademark of the DuPont Corporation and refers to these CFCs, and later hydro chlorofluorocarbon HCFC and hydro fluorocarbon HFC, refrigerants developed in the late 1920s. These refrigerants were considered at the time to be less harmful than the commonly-used refrigerants of the time, including methyl formate, ammonia, methyl chloride, and sulfur dioxide. The intent was to give refrigeration equipment for home use without danger. These CFC refrigerants answered that need. In the 1970s, though, the compounds were found to be reacting with atmospheric ozone, an important certificate against solar ultraviolet radiation, and their use as a refrigerant worldwide was curtailed in the Montreal Protocol of 1987.