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History of the Refrigerator Essay

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History of the Refrigerator

Back in time a long time ago, around 500 B.C. the Egyptians and Indians made ice on cold nights by setting water out in earthenware pots and keeping the pots wet. In the 18th century England, servants collected ice in the winter and put it into icehouses, where the sheets of ice were packed in salt, wrapped in strips of flannel and stored underground to keep them frozen until summer. Before the refrigerator or "ice box" was introduced people used snow and ice to keep their food cool, which was either found locally or brought down from the mountains. Cellars and caves were also used to refrigerate food. Meat and fish were preserved in warm weather by salting or smoking. The first cellars were holes dug …show more content…

Compressed ether machines were built in Pennsylvania by Oliver Evans in 1805 and in Australia by James Harrison in 1855, and Dr. John Gorrie in Florida built an expanding air-cooling machine in 1844. In 1851 Dr. John Gorrie created the first commercial ice making machine to cool the air for his yellow fever patients. Soon thereafter, refrigeration and freezing became popular methods of preserving foods for transport or storage, and in place where natural ice was not available.
Refrigeration is the process of removing heat from an enclosed space, or from a substance, to lower its temperature. A refrigerator uses the evaporation of a liquid to absorb heat. The liquid, or refrigerant used in a refrigerator evaporates at an extremely low temperature creating freezing temperatures inside the refrigerator.
William Cullen at the University of Glasgow demonstrated the first known artificial refrigeration in 1748. However, he did not use his discovery for any practical purpose. In 1805, an American inventor, Oliver Evans, designed the first refrigerator machine.
The development of mechanical refrigeration systems began in the early19th century and arose mainly from the needs of meat producers in the USA, South America, Australia and New Zealand, who were facing many difficulties in shipping their produce to their export markers in Europe. Many experimental systems were built in the 1830s, utilizing the cooling effect produced by the expansion of

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