Who Invented the Refrigerator?

The invention of the modern refrigerator was not the work of a single individual, but rather the culmination of multiple innovations and advancements over time. In today’s world, home refrigeration plays a vital role in preserving perishable foods, prolonging their shelf life, and reducing waste. With the progressive transition from passive refrigeration to mechanized systems, the commercial home refrigerator has become an integral part of modern consumer living.

Before the advent of the modern refrigerator, people depended on snow and ice to cool their food. Ancient forms of refrigeration involved digging holes in the ground, lining them, and packing them with ice sourced locally, or transported from mountainous regions. The oldest known passive refrigerator, the Yakchal, was a traditional Persian structure used to store ice and preserve food in ancient Iran. Constructed primarily from mudbrick, sand, and straw, the Yakchal was a distinctive tall conical shape – to minimize the transfer of outside heat. 

These remarkable structures featured thick walls that worked to maintain a cool interior temperature. In addition, they featured highly effective ventilation systems called windcatchers that channeled cool breezes into the underground chamber where the ice was stored. The Yakhal exemplifies the remarkable ingenuity and resourcefulness of ancient Persian engineering. It also serves as an ingenious early example of the use of natural principles to refrigerate perishable foods. 

The Chemistry of Cooling

William Cullen (1710-1790) initially pursued a career in medicine. Besides working as a General Practitioner (GP) at the University of Edinburgh, he co-founded the Royal Society of Medicine. In 1740 he was awarded the degree of Medical Doctor from the University of Glasgow. 

However, it was Cullen’s interest in the fledgling science of chemistry that would ultimately define his legacy. In 1748, he put the idea of using evaporation to create low temperatures – refrigeration – to the test. In a packed lecture hall at the University of Glasgow, Cullen used a pump to create a vacuum within a container of diethyl ether, he showed that as the ether boiled it absorbed heat from its surroundings and began to cool. Cullen’s milestone was no less than the world’s first demonstration of artificial refrigeration.

Yet despite Cullen’s remarkable achievement, his invention lacked immediate practical applications. It would not be until the nineteenth century that his pioneering feat would be reconfigured and put to use in the production of commercial refrigerators. 

The birth of mechanical refrigeration revolutionized the preservation of perishable food. Yet the first efforts at modern refrigerator design were costly, cumbersome, and limited to the middle classes. Oliver Evans’s vapor-compression refrigerator (1805) laid the foundations for companies such as General Electric, Kelvinator, and Electrolux to put the compression refrigerator into mass production. By the 1920s compression refrigerators had become widely available and affordable. 

Problematically, these early models relied on toxic gases such as Ammonia, Methyl Chloride, and Sulfur Dioxide as refrigerants. Gradually, an increasing number of accidents led to efforts to discover less dangerous methods of refrigeration. The answer came in the late 1920s when a team of scientists backed by three American Corporations, General Motors, Du Point, and Kinetic Chemicals, discovered the utility of Chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) and Hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC) refrigerators. 

These new refrigerants were collectively marketed as Freon. Within a few years, Freon became the standard refrigerator until 1993, when CFCs were identified as “super” greenhouse gases and progressively phased out. 

Einstein’s Failed Intervention

Before the discovery of Freon, two seemingly unlikely physicists came up with another solution.  While Albert Einstein is better known for his groundbreaking work in theoretical physics, he also extended his expertise to the world of commercial refrigeration. In 1926, Einstein and his doctoral student Leo Szilard read in a newspaper that an entire family in Berlin had died from the toxic fumes emitted from their faulty refrigerator seal– they decided that the issue was prone-to-failure mechanized compressors.

Drawing upon their cutting-edge work on electromagnetism and thermodynamics, Einstein and Szilard devised a fridge that eliminated the need for a compressor. The Einstein-Szilard design was an absorption refrigerator that worked by creating a closed loop of evaporation, absorption, and condensation – without the need for moving mechanical parts. However, despite the ingenuity of the design, it failed to achieve commercial success. The advent of the Great Depression and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, coupled with the development of Freon in the USA thwarted their plans.