WILLIAM CULLEN In the 1740s William Cullen a scientist and professor at the University of Glasgow began experimenting with the evaporation of liquids to learn how they could serve as coolants Cullen used a pump to create a vacuum over a container of ether and then heated the ether As the ether began boiling it absorbed heat from the container's surroundings causing the container to cool But Cullen's work was purely scientific He was a theorist who wanted to learn about science for the sake of knowledge not for practical application Cullen's discovery served as a starting point for a number of other inventors who improved on one another's ideas ultimately leading to today's refrigerator A Century in the Making Gorrie's design was based on principles established by William Cullen of the University of Glasgow in Scotland almost a century earlier Cullen showed that when a liquid evaporates it extracts heat from its surroundings Compressing a gas on the other hand causes it to heat up Removing the pressure causes the gas to expand and absorb heat In 1755 Cullen demonstrated this principle to create a small amount of ice by heating ether a flammable liquid until it became a gas This principle of refrigeration cooling caused by the rapid expansion of gases remains basic to An estimated 500 million refrigerator freezers were refrigeration today in use in the world as of February 2015 In 1805 the American inventor Oliver Evans capitalized on Cullen's
basic principle to design a refrigeration machine that used vapor instead of liquid Evans one of the most prolific inventors of his time never built his refrigeration machine perhaps because he was too busy inventing the first high pressure steam engine and a predecessor to the automobile This task fell to fellow American inventor Jacob Perkins who began experimenting with refrigeration after moving to London England in the 1830s In 1834 Perkins built a closed loop system that moved heat from one place to another Rather than release the gas into the air the device pumped it away from the refrigeration area and compressed it again The system released the heat into the outside air and pumped the gas back to begin the cycle again Jacob Perkins's closed loop system advanced
JOHN GORRIE John Gorrie was born in 1803 and spent most of his childhood in South Carolina After receiving a degree in medicine he moved to Apalachicola Florida a port city on the Gulf of Mexico In addition to practicing medicine Gorrie studied tropical diseases Like most physicians of the time Gorrie incorrectly believed malaria yellow fever and other diseases were caused by hot air a theory that was supported by his observation that nature would terminate the fevers by changing the seasons He wrote several articles urging people to drain swamps and marshlands places where disease carrying mosquitoes thrived When Gorrie pursued the idea of using refrigeration to cool patients he quickly discovered ice was expensive and sometimes hard to come by in the South so he began exploring the potential of making artificial ice By 1845 he quit practicing medicine to set about engineering an ice making system While receiving a US patent for his ice making machine was a step forward Gorrie's failure to succeed as a businessman because of circumstances plus an early death left him unknown in his day He has since become renowned as a leading pioneer in refrigeration While Perkins received an English patent for his design Gorrie received a US patent on May 6 1851 for a machine that would convert water into ice artificially by absorbing its heat of liquefaction with expanding air Gorrie's system moved water through a series of pipes releasing heat and cooling the water to make ice A Chilly Reception Gorrie's machine was not met with the same excitement as his chilled champagne Few people felt the need for such a contraption For many generations people had relied on natural ice to keep things cool Most people were used to A diagram for Gorrie's ice machine taken from his US patent
