Preserving food has not always been easy. Centuries ago, people gathered ice from streams and ponds and did their best to store it year-round in icehouses and cellars, so they had a ready supply to keep their food cold. Even with ice, people were often limited to eating locally grown foods that had to be purchased fresh and used daily, notes the Greatest Engineering Achievements of the 20th Century Web site.
The Egyptians, Chinese and Indians were some of the early people to use ice in food preservation. In 1626, Sir Francis Bacon was also testing the idea that cold could be used to preserve meat; his chilly experiment caused him to develop pneumonia, from which he died on Easter Day, April 9, 1626.
Even Peter Mark Roget, compiler of Roget’s Thesaurus, studied refrigeration, suggesting a design for a “frigidarium.”
Progress took time, however, and snow and ice served as the primary means of refrigeration until the beginning of the 20th century.
Iceboxes
According to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, one of the next steps between storing ice underground and modern refrigeration was the icebox. Introduced in 19th century England, wooden iceboxes were lined with tin or zinc, and filled with sawdust, seaweed and other materials to keep the ice from melting. Drip pans caught the water that melted and had to be emptied daily.
In the United States, warm winters in 1889 and 1890 caused ice shortages that fueled the need to create a better refrigeration system.
A Encyclopedia Britannica entry attributes the beginning of commercial refrigeration to Alexander C. Twinning, an American businessman, in 1856. Later, an Australian named James Harrison reviewed the refrigerator used by Twinning, and another made by physician John Gorrie, and developed vapor-compression refrigeration for the brewing and meatpacking industries.
In 1859, France’s Ferdinand Carré created a more advanced system that used ammonia as a coolant; the earlier vapor-compression machines used air. The ammonia worked well, but was toxic if it leaked. Engineers worked until the 1920s to come up with better alternatives, one of which was Freon.