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The household electric refrigerator was one the 20th century's greatest inventions, allowing housewives to "cast off the shackles of ice." With an electric refrigerator, they didn't buy ice-they made it. They had new freedom to store a wider variety of foods longer. Frozen foods before the electric refrigerator? Forget it. How could you keep frozen foods in an icebox? The electric refrigerator made our lives safer and richer.
"That Philosophers' Stone of the refrigerating engineer-the domestic refrigerating machine that could be run by the cook . . . a machine that required . . . no attention at all, was found not to be a line but a gulf which has not been successfully bridged."1
With these words, John E. Starr, consulting engineer and first president of The American Society of Refrigerating Engineers (ASRE), aptly summed up the situation in 1916. Technical genius had not yet touched the refrigerating machine and turned it into the golden dream of that foolproof necessity: the household refrigerator we now so take for granted.
Refrigerators now provide effortless and almost silent service, but the technical journey to this end required considerable engineering effort at great expense.
In 1892, trade journal Ice and Refrigeration envisioned the future: "The refrigeration of private residences is the next step in the development of mechanical refrigeration ... but the day will undoubtedly come when the refrigeration of residences (perhaps by the employment of the electric motor as power) will become an important item, requiring, perhaps, special machines for that purpose and special study of the particular requirements of the field."2
Refrigerating engineering already had provided systems for ice manufacture and cold storage. These systems were large and operated quite well in plants where trained technicians tended their steam-engine drives, tightened ammonia-leaking shaft stuffing boxes, manually adjusted condenser water flow and tweaked evaporator expansion valves to keep things operating smoothly. By contrast, a home had no trained technician and no place to put a steam engine!
Early Technical Advances
The most common means of driving a refrigeration machine was the steam engine. These engines needed constant attention and were not easy to control automatically. The logical alternative was a high-starting torque electric motor that could be powered by the single-phase alternating current lines being strung...