Tim Buszka, a senior associate product marketing manager with the Whirlpool Corporation, says the icebox became more commonplace for middle and upper-class families in the s. The earliest models of the refrigerator really just had one feature to them- a chunk of ice. According to archival records from the Smithsonian National Museum of American History , the icebox was an insulated cabinet with a compartment containing ice that kept perishable foods cool.
Fresh ice would have to be inserted into the fridge every week or so. When the first home refrigerator was introduced in the early s, Buszka says it was a luxury for even the wealthiest Americans. It wasn't until early s that companies like Whirlpool introduced the earliest forms of the single-unit refrigerator featuring a brand new technology-evaporative cooling. It was a self-contained unit, and "wasn't cheap at the time, but didn't require the same amount of installation and maintenance of earlier models," Buszka explained.
According to Pacific Standard magazine , only eight percent of American residences had a refrigerator in the early s-but by the early s, almost 45 percent of American homes had ditched ice boxes and installed a refrigerator. The Whirlpool models produced en masse in the early s had top freezers. Design features that we know and love now, like wood trim handles and bottom-drawer freezers came along later.
Beginning in the s, Whirlpool kicked off the trend of designing refrigerators and other appliances in vivid colors , including signature hues like "harvest gold" and "avocado green. These refrigerators were also used in breweries and meat packing houses. Fred W. Wolf of Fort Wayne, Indiana invented in refrigerators for home and domestic use, that were generally a unit that was mounted on top of an ice box, and many other worked to improve the idea.
Nathaniel B. Wales of Detroit, Michigan, introduced an idea for a refrigeration unit that worked on electric power in Alfred Mellowes made his variant of refrigerator with a compressor that was placed at the bottom of the cabinet in His idea was bought in by Frigidaire Company which started mass-producing refrigerators.
In the same year, Kelvinator Company started producing their refrigerators, which were based on the Nathaniel B. By , they held 80 percent of the market for electric refrigerators. In , Baltzar von Platen and Carl Munters from Sweden invented a so-called absorption refrigerator which uses a heat source to provide the energy needed to drive the cooling system. These early refrigerators often had mechanical parts, motor and compressor, in the basement or an adjacent room while the cold box was located in the kitchen.
Human cultures have long known that cold temperatures can protect valuable foodstuffs from bacteria and other factors that may render them inedible. Preservative methods such as salting and drying were also effective, but these were not well suited to all kinds of food. Before mechanical refrigeration was widely available, many cultures used well-insulated buildings called icehouses for food storage, using winter ice and snow as natural coolants.
These structures date to the second millennium BC in Europe and Asia, and the names of the engineers who designed them have been lost to history. Icehouses were used well into modern times, particularly in rural areas where electricity and appliances were expensive or unavailable. In the early s, American engineer Thomas Moore created a home version of the icehouse, a portable insulated chamber cooled by block ice.
Moore coined the term "refrigerator" to describe his invention, although it came to be more commonly known as the "icebox. In many areas, a local delivery person, colloquially known as an "iceman" in the U. In the s, Scottish physicist William Cullen discovered that some chemical reactions would draw heat away from a particular area, creating a pocket of cold.
Cullen, unconcerned with the practical applications of his discovery, did not realize he had found the basis for modern refrigeration. It was not until that scientist Jacob Perkins built and patented the first functioning refrigerator.
Perkins, a major figure in American engineering , also tinkered with heating and cooling systems for the home and is sometimes called the father of refrigeration. Ten years later, U.
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