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 into the ground and lined with wood or straw and packed with refrigeration for most of history. At the beginning of the 19th century, ice boxes were used in England. These ice boxes were typically made of wood, lined with tin or zinc and insulated with various materials including cork, sawdust or seaweed. They were used to hold blocks of ice and refrigerate food. Ice was delivered as needed (people simply hung the “Ice Today” sign in their window for the delivery man) and a drip pan collected the melted water which then had to be emptied daily. Natural ice was harvested, distributed and used in both commercial and home applications in the mid-1800s. The ice trade between Boston and the South was one of the first casualties of the Civil War. Warm winters in 1898 and 1890 created severe shortages of natural ice in the U.S. This stimulated the use of mechanical refrigeration for the freezing and storage of fish and in the brewing, dairy and meat packing industries. During the nineteenth century, numerous experimental devices were developed in an effort to achieve practical artificial refrigeration. Compressed ether machines were built in Pennsylvania by Oliver Evans in 1805 ...
