The History Of Refrigerators

William Cullen demonstrated the first known artificial refrigeration system during the 1700s at the University of Glasgow. This early refrigerator used vapor-compression refrigeration as outlined by Michael Faraday.

In 1805 Oliver Evans designed the first refrigeration machine that used liquid vapor rather than liquid. In 1902 Willis Haviland Carrier demonstrated the first air conditioning unit. In between these two major innovations, many different inventors contributed to the field of refrigeration and all type of cooling machinery.

Around 1851 Dr. John Gorrie showed his ice maker and in 1856 James Harrison revealed his vapor-compression refrigeration for the meat packing and brewery industries. Other well known coolant machine inventors include David Boyle, Raoul Pictet and Charles Telier.

During the first portion of the 1900s nearly half of all households in the United States still relied on iceboxes which required regular supplied of ice for

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keeping food cold. Ice for household ice boxes was quite expensive as it had to be mechanically produced or cut from winter ponds, stored somewhere and then delivered to customers. Many people simply could not afford this luxury.The remaining portion of the population had no type of refrigeration at all.

On the other end of the spectrum, in a very limited number of cases during the beginning of the 20th century there were homes of very wealthy people that had mechanical cooling units for both food as well as living spaces.

The first publicly available refrigerators sold for about two times the cost of an automobile, or about $1,000 USD. During the years between 1910 and 1920 several companies made efforts to produce their own refrigerators and borrowed from each others’ models and knowledge.

In the 1920s several different refrigerator models of varying prices and with different features were introduced. 1927 was the year that the first major wave of mass produced refrigerators came about and more than 1,000,000 refrigerators were produced by General Electric.

The 1930s saw Freon expand the refrigerator market considerably and the 1940s saw the introduction of refrigerator and freezer units. It wasn’t until after World War II that the common household refrigerator was mass produced and found in more homes than not.


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