Speaker 1: In text with Technology with text style from how Stuff,
Speaker 1: what's that coming? Hey then, everyone, and welcome to tex Stuff.
Speaker 1: I am Jonathan Strickland, one of the two hosts of
Speaker 1: the show, and I'm Lauren vocal Bon, the other of
Speaker 1: the two hosts of the show. And today we wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about something that's pretty cool. Oh no, yeah,
Speaker 1: already started. We're gonna talk about refrigerators. And and here's
Speaker 1: the interesting thing, guys, if you listen to the episode
Speaker 1: that Chris Pallette and I did quite some time ago
Speaker 1: about air conditioners, this podcast is going to sound very
Speaker 1: similar to that because the technology is used in air
Speaker 1: conditioning systems and the technologies used in refrigerators are essentially
Speaker 1: the same, just one is a more small and controlled
Speaker 1: and um not for people usually, right, No, there's some
Speaker 1: notable exceptions to that. We are not going to talk
Speaker 1: about those, guys, because that's creepy and probably belongs in
Speaker 1: another podcast. Okay, so we're not talking about people in
Speaker 1: refrigerators today, although now I can't think of anything else. Um,
Speaker 1: but no, no, no, First, let's start with what the
Speaker 1: definition of refrigeration is. So it's defined as the process
Speaker 1: of achieving and maintaining a temperature below that of the surroundings.
Speaker 1: And the aim of it is to cool some sort
Speaker 1: of space or object to a required temperature, right, because
Speaker 1: bacteria grow most rapidly in this and it's it's called
Speaker 1: the danger zone. Actually in between I now I have
Speaker 1: a new thing filling up my head. But okay, yes
Speaker 1: that I debatably better than than Archer really and so okay,
Speaker 1: well excellent, but so yeah, the danger zone is in
Speaker 1: between forty degrees fahrenheit and a hundred and forty degrees fahrenheit,
Speaker 1: which is a four point four to sixty degrees celsius.
Speaker 1: And and in that temperature range, bacteria really just groove out.
Speaker 1: They can they can more than double in in twenty minutes.
Speaker 1: That population just explodes. And and bacteria and for things
Speaker 1: like you know, food stuff that that we would consume,
Speaker 1: that's not necessarily a great mix. That can lead to
Speaker 1: u some pretty nasty contamination. Uh, it can lead to
Speaker 1: some really serious health problems. And uh, and this is
Speaker 1: why refrigeration is such a big deal. I mean, clearly,
Speaker 1: before we had any kind of refrigeration, we had to
Speaker 1: look at different ways to preserve food. Otherwise you pretty
Speaker 1: much had to get food from the source and consume
Speaker 1: it right away, immediately or as close to immediately as possible.
Speaker 1: Or you had to cook it so that it would yeah,
Speaker 1: so it wouldn't spoil as quickly. Or you had to
Speaker 1: salt it like crazy so that again the salting would
Speaker 1: would inhibit the bacteria from from uh from reproducing so quickly.
Speaker 1: And even in refrigeration, we still have that uh, that process.
Speaker 1: It's just slowed down quite a bit, which is why
Speaker 1: you cannot leave food in a refrigerator uh indefinitely. It
Speaker 1: will eventually go bad. Um. And then just like in
Speaker 1: that great Far Side cartoon, the potato salad will hold
Speaker 1: up the catchup when potato salad goes bad. So the
Speaker 1: trick here, though, is how do you create this cool environment?
Speaker 1: This this cold environment? Because adding heat two things is easy.
Speaker 1: Taking heat away not as easy, less easy. And also,
Speaker 1: before I get all my physicist friends sending in messages
Speaker 1: about the use of the word heat, I do apologize
Speaker 1: we're going to be using it in the vernacular quite
Speaker 1: a bit because that's really what everyone's familiar with. But
Speaker 1: to be clear, an object does not possess heat. It
Speaker 1: has a temperature, but it doesn't possess heat, and objecos
Speaker 1: will have internal energy as a result of molecular motion.
Speaker 1: And heat is really the description of an energy transfer process.
Speaker 1: And uh, you go from a high temperature object to
Speaker 1: a lower temperature one. That is the basic concept of heat.
Speaker 1: It's really an energy transfer. So when we say, like,
Speaker 1: this object's got a lot of heat to it, uh,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a completely colloquial way by saying it.
Speaker 1: So I do acknowledge that. I apologize. But if you
Speaker 1: really want someone who's going to be a stickler for science,
Speaker 1: go bug Robert Lamb because he loves that the stuff
Speaker 1: to blow your mind. Gay, Um, Robert's awesome. I love Robert. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the way heat works. Though you have high temperature
Speaker 1: low temperature, then heat moves from the high temperature to
Speaker 1: the low temperature. It does not go the other way around,
Speaker 1: right without without some sort of external force working on
Speaker 1: the system. Uh. This is essentially one of the basic
Speaker 1: laws of thermodynamics. And so you've got this, Uh, you've
Speaker 1: got a way. You have to find a way of
Speaker 1: creating a lower temperature or environment to pull heat from
Speaker 1: or to for heat to transfer from the objects that
Speaker 1: are inside a refrigerator to make them cool. So that's
Speaker 1: the basis of refrigeration. But you know, to get to
Speaker 1: that point, we had to do a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: and we had to understand a lot about physics for
Speaker 1: this to become what we now all kind of take
Speaker 1: for granted. Yeah, So to to get started, I guess
Speaker 1: we can talk about what the predecessor was to the
Speaker 1: modern refrigerator, which was the ice box, right, or you know,
Speaker 1: going going way back in time, you had you had
Speaker 1: people not even making ice boxes, but yes, just collecting
Speaker 1: ice and putting it next to stuff. Yeah, or like
Speaker 1: maybe you know, you might have a seller that you'd
Speaker 1: put ice into, or you might just have a hole
Speaker 1: in the ground, or you may just like if you
Speaker 1: were in a part of the world where there was
Speaker 1: a significant amount of snowfall. Uh, we here in Georgia
Speaker 1: are not in that part of the world. We did
Speaker 1: have some know the other day, I could see a
Speaker 1: bare trace of it next to my steps. Some of
Speaker 1: it landed in my hair when I walked my dog.
Speaker 1: That was that was about it. But if you were
Speaker 1: in a place where they get a significant amount of
Speaker 1: snow and they're large snow banks, then one of the
Speaker 1: things you might do is store some food inside the snow.
Speaker 1: They're bury it in the snow and just hope that
Speaker 1: nothing comes along to to grab that food. Or Yeah,
Speaker 1: if if you've got an ice house, you can preserve
Speaker 1: some of the ice with a sawdust or wood shavings.
Speaker 1: Later on, cork was used to insulate it for a
Speaker 1: few months anyway, until temperatures warmed up enough. Right right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could. You could definitely slow the process, insulated enough
Speaker 1: from the heat of the outside environment so that it
Speaker 1: would preserve you wouldn't lose too much in melt off.
Speaker 1: It took a while before people started to figure out
Speaker 1: the best ways to keep ice from from melting too quickly.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting because just as they were really getting
Speaker 1: getting very good and making sure they kept ice uh
Speaker 1: cold for as long as pas well, even in hot environments. Uh,
Speaker 1: that's when the mechanical refrigeration technology had started to really
Speaker 1: take off and it became less important. And these were
Speaker 1: happening simultaneously, which is really fascinating to me. It was
Speaker 1: in seventive that the first refrigerating machine was produced. I
Speaker 1: believe it could make small amounts of ice in the lab. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: to to really understand well, first of all, the word refrigerator,
Speaker 1: I found the I found the earliest use of it,
Speaker 1: which was or at least earliest recorded use that I
Speaker 1: could find, which was from fifteen fifty. But it was
Speaker 1: all about using chemicals in water. People were discovering that
Speaker 1: if they added certain chemicals to water for some reason,
Speaker 1: the temperature of the water would drop. So if you
Speaker 1: were to put something in a container of water that
Speaker 1: had this chemical in it, you could cool that's something. Now,
Speaker 1: if that's something was unprotected food and that chemical was poisonous,
Speaker 1: that was not necessarily a great thing. But if that's
Speaker 1: something were I don't know, a bottle of wine and
Speaker 1: you happen to be French, this was a great way
Speaker 1: to cool your wine. And in fact, in the Renaissance,
Speaker 1: these cooled drinks became very popular, to the point where
Speaker 1: if you added chemicals to water, it would drop the
Speaker 1: temperature enough that if you put something in it that
Speaker 1: that you could turn on a regular basis, you could
Speaker 1: actually make ice this way. Um. Yeah, So this was
Speaker 1: kind of an early ice maker, not efficient, not good
Speaker 1: for producing ice on any kind of large scale, but
Speaker 1: it was one of those things that the rich people
Speaker 1: really enjoyed, and really those were the only ones who
Speaker 1: had any chance of getting at it. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it was just before your the refrigerator unit type thing
Speaker 1: you were talking about from the seventeen seventies. Seventeen fifty
Speaker 1: five is pretty much when we talk about the origin
Speaker 1: of the idea. That's when William Cullen made his machine
Speaker 1: with which you used a vacuum UH and UH ether
Speaker 1: to UH to create this UH environment where he would
Speaker 1: put water into a container, put a smaller amount of
Speaker 1: ether in there, put a essentially a vacuum bell jar
Speaker 1: on top, you know, with a pump on it. By
Speaker 1: creating the vacuum, the ether would start to boil off.
Speaker 1: And when the ether was boiling off, when it was vaporizing,
Speaker 1: he noticed that the temperature was going down in the
Speaker 1: water and in fact, but when the ether would continue
Speaker 1: to boil off, the water would start to turn into ice.
Speaker 1: Now we'll talk about why that is a little bit later,
Speaker 1: but this was one of those early observations that started
Speaker 1: to lead people into thinking, you know, if we harness
Speaker 1: this in some way, pretty cool. Yeah, there's no way
Speaker 1: to avoid it. Voco boumb Join us together, we will
Speaker 1: rule the galaxy. Jonathan. We need to we need to
Speaker 1: chill out, Yes we do. Okay, all right, now too fast,
Speaker 1: too fast. You gotta gotta pace yourself here. Um. So anyway,
Speaker 1: this does form the basis. This, this idea of UH
Speaker 1: vapor pulling out heat somehow, that is what was the
Speaker 1: very basis of mechanical refrigeration. It would be quite a
Speaker 1: while before the mechanical refrigerators would start to become a
Speaker 1: real thing. Uh, I have a in eighteen o three,
Speaker 1: you have a Thomas Moore obviously not that one different
Speaker 1: Thomas Moore UH of Maryland. In fact, he received a U. S.
Speaker 1: Patent for a refrigerator. Now this was not the same
Speaker 1: thing as the mechanical refrigerators that would come later. But
Speaker 1: that same year that was when the domestic ice box
Speaker 1: was invented. So three you get the domestic ice box.
Speaker 1: This was usually a wooden cabinet that you would put
Speaker 1: a block of a large block of ice into the
Speaker 1: top and then you would keep your food and and
Speaker 1: and consumables in the bottom part of this cabinet, and
Speaker 1: convection would essentially keep because because heat rises and cold sinks,
Speaker 1: that which is which we know is the generalization was generalization, yes,
Speaker 1: but but in general in this particular case, yeah, you've
Speaker 1: got you've got the dense the dense cold air going
Speaker 1: down and the and the less dense warm air moving up.
Speaker 1: Because yeah, but we we understand that is a gross
Speaker 1: over generalization. But for the purposes of this podcast, it's
Speaker 1: effective enough. Yeah, you kept that ice on top. You
Speaker 1: have a like a drip tray on underneath, because hey,
Speaker 1: that ice is melting um, and so you would collect
Speaker 1: the water which you would not just pour into the
Speaker 1: top where it would magically become ice again. Essentially, once
Speaker 1: that ice was gone, you had to go out and
Speaker 1: buy more ice. And actually the ice trade was really
Speaker 1: huge right around that time. In eighteen o six, I
Speaker 1: think Frederick Tudor began his his ice empire. He was
Speaker 1: called the Ice King. Yeah, um, when he started cutting
Speaker 1: chunks out of the Hudson River in various ponds around
Speaker 1: Massachusetts and then exporting it as far as China and Australia.
Speaker 1: In India India. Yeah. Also what's interesting is that India
Speaker 1: was the way the way they were producing ice in
Speaker 1: India at this time was through a process called nocturnal
Speaker 1: radiative cooling. Right, I was reading about this this it
Speaker 1: took me a while to grasp how that work. I
Speaker 1: still did not understand it. So, I mean what I
Speaker 1: w I understand that basically they were doing was putting
Speaker 1: water in shallow clay trays and setting it outside under
Speaker 1: the open sky overnight and then in the morning ice
Speaker 1: would be there. Yeah, what what essentially is happening is
Speaker 1: that the uh, it's there is another physical process going
Speaker 1: on here. But you've got you've got a tray of
Speaker 1: water outside. The sky needs to be clear because what's
Speaker 1: happening is the heat is radiating from the water out
Speaker 1: into the atmosphere and escaping that way. Now, if there
Speaker 1: are clouds, then the heat can radiate back down too,
Speaker 1: because it's like an insulator. It'll it'll end up insulating
Speaker 1: the earth and you end up you don't get enough. Right.
Speaker 1: But otherwise, even if the the ambient temperature outside is
Speaker 1: still right around freezing or just above freezing, you can
Speaker 1: still freeze water that way. Under a clear sky also
Speaker 1: helps if it's a very dry climate. Right, And and
Speaker 1: from what I understand that it's important that it's a
Speaker 1: it's an earthenware tray because that way you get some
Speaker 1: of the uh, well, you have to have that insulated
Speaker 1: effect there as well. It's the earthen tray and there's
Speaker 1: usually hay underneath it, Yeah, some kind of compressed Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's it's interesting that that was the way that
Speaker 1: India was producing ice, but that was not a very
Speaker 1: again and a very efficient way of producing ice. You
Speaker 1: couldn't produce a lot of it, and uh there was
Speaker 1: a big demand. So Tutor was really raking it in
Speaker 1: by harvesting ice in the United States, just natural ice.
Speaker 1: Not he's not producing it in any mechanical means. He's
Speaker 1: actually going out and digging it up, packing it in
Speaker 1: wood shavings and that sort of stuff, cork, that kind
Speaker 1: of thing, shipping it to the other side of the world,
Speaker 1: and making huge bank off of it, huge bank. And
Speaker 1: I want to mention that also right around this time,
Speaker 1: in UH seven, ammonia was first liquefied in a laboratory, right,
Speaker 1: which will becoming point um, So just keep that in
Speaker 1: your heads for a second. And um. And then also
Speaker 1: in eighteen o five, right before Tutor began his big
Speaker 1: ice trade, UM, Oliver Evans described did not create but
Speaker 1: described a closed at their vacuum refrigeration system. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: this is the same sort of of mechanical system that
Speaker 1: would eventually become what we use in refrigerators, most refrigerators,
Speaker 1: I'm saying refrigerators in general, but there are different types. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: we'll mention a few, but but the we're focusing on
Speaker 1: what most of us have available in like in our kitchens, uh,
Speaker 1: and maybe our basement if Okay, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: go back there. It's dark base to a dark placed
Speaker 1: voco bomb really early on, I'm very fond of that
Speaker 1: of that documentary American Psychos. Okay, that's fair. In eighteen twenty, Uh,
Speaker 1: this is interesting that the Michael Faraday was working again
Speaker 1: with liquid ammonia, and that's when he started realizing that
Speaker 1: liquid ammonia, which ammonia is naturally at room temperature, is
Speaker 1: a gas, right because it boils it at like negative
Speaker 1: twenty seven degrees fahrenheits. So, so to to liquefy it,
Speaker 1: you have to compress it, you have to pressurize it
Speaker 1: to make it a liquid. And he realized that when
Speaker 1: it went from liquid back to gas, it caused cooling
Speaker 1: and so again another important part of this mechanical refrigeration. Now,
Speaker 1: in one a German physicist by the name T. J.
Speaker 1: Cbeck discovered that if you have two junctions of dissimilar
Speaker 1: metals kept at two different temperatures, it induces electromotive force
Speaker 1: or electric currents. So what that means is that, let's
Speaker 1: say that you have a junction of a copper wire
Speaker 1: and an iron wire, all right, and then you have
Speaker 1: a second junction where the iron wire is attached to
Speaker 1: a second copper wire. And let's say you were to
Speaker 1: heat up that, uh, that first junction and cool down
Speaker 1: the second junction, perhaps put some ice on it, you
Speaker 1: would actually induce electricity to flow through that wire. Now
Speaker 1: that's important because in eighteen thirty four, uh Peltier discovers
Speaker 1: that if you do the opposite, if you put electricity
Speaker 1: through a series of wires that have these kind of junctions,
Speaker 1: one side will heat up and the other side will
Speaker 1: cool down exactly and then by up to I think
Speaker 1: forty degrees fahrenheit. It all depends on what kind of
Speaker 1: material material you're using. Uh. In fact, this sort of
Speaker 1: is called the Peltier effect. Actually, but this sort of
Speaker 1: effect is dependent upon the types of metals or or
Speaker 1: materials you're using and uh, their purity. If you're using
Speaker 1: pure metals, the effect is is pretty small, so small
Speaker 1: as to not be very useful. It's interesting in the
Speaker 1: laboratory setting, but not terribly useful. Also, if you're using
Speaker 1: pure metals, they tend to be very good thermal conductors,
Speaker 1: which means that that that difference in temperature will not
Speaker 1: mean taine itself for very long. You will eventually have
Speaker 1: the the heat will move from the high temperature to
Speaker 1: the low temperature and balance that out. Uh. Meanwhile, if
Speaker 1: you were to use an insulator, then you wouldn't get
Speaker 1: the effect, So it would take years before anyone would
Speaker 1: find a way to make that useful. But that is
Speaker 1: used that That same technique is used in some electric
Speaker 1: little portable refrigerators, things like the kind of stuff you
Speaker 1: might plug into your your car outlet. Yeah, basically, you
Speaker 1: just get a whole bunch of these junctions set up.
Speaker 1: You put the hot ones outside the unit, the cool
Speaker 1: ones inside the unit. Fridge. Yep, that's exactly it. So
Speaker 1: so spoiler alert, that's how that one works. But we
Speaker 1: thought if i'd be interesting to talk about that. But
Speaker 1: that's that was what caused was the basis of that
Speaker 1: sort of refrigerator. UM. And that same year, in thirty four,
Speaker 1: Jacob Perkins developed a vapor compression cycle refrigerator using ether.
Speaker 1: So you got a lot of people working on patent
Speaker 1: for it. Happened that year m H and UH eighteen
Speaker 1: forty four you had John Gory proposing an air cycle
Speaker 1: refrigerating machine for making ice. UH. Eighteen fifty you had
Speaker 1: Rudolph Clauseus who said heat can never pass from a
Speaker 1: colder to a warmer body without some other change connected
Speaker 1: there with occurring at the same time. This is what
Speaker 1: I was talking about at the top of the podcast.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a rewording of the second law of thermodynamics.
Speaker 1: It's related to that. So UH, that's one of the
Speaker 1: the principles that guided refrigeration as well. UH. In eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty one, our buddy John Gory from back when he
Speaker 1: had proposed that air cycle refrigerating refrigeration machine to to
Speaker 1: create ice. In eighteen fifty one, that's when he got
Speaker 1: the another patent for mechanical refrigeration. And in eighteen fifty
Speaker 1: five Alexander Twining starts his first commercial ice making plant
Speaker 1: using vapor compression refrigeration. We'll explain what that is in
Speaker 1: more detail in a little bit. Eighteen fifty six, commercial
Speaker 1: refrigeration begins in industries like brewing and meat packing. Now,
Speaker 1: commercial refrigeration did not necessarily mean they were using mechanical refrigeration.
Speaker 1: They could be using natural refrigeration, as in going out
Speaker 1: and buying lots and lots of money and packing stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: It's interesting to me that brewing picked up on this
Speaker 1: really quickly, like like the brewing companies were like, we
Speaker 1: want beer that tastes good. It's as though alcohol technology
Speaker 1: is something that drives industry in some way. Yeah. Meat
Speaker 1: the meat packers were slower to follow suit, which is disturbing.
Speaker 1: Spoiled meat was something everyone was used to write and
Speaker 1: if you're drunk enough, you don't care. Okay, got it.
Speaker 1: I understand now. As someone who does not imbube alcohol,
Speaker 1: it was just completely foreign to me. But I don't
Speaker 1: eat meat either, so what do I care? Um. Also,
Speaker 1: we're no longer in the eighteen fifties, as it turns out.
Speaker 1: But yeah, meat packing was slow to adopt this technology,
Speaker 1: but it did start it back in the eighteen fifties,
Speaker 1: and the majority of plants wouldn't switch to mechanical refrigeration
Speaker 1: until about nineteen fourteen, and by then you were getting
Speaker 1: into a really like a booming time of refrigeration. But
Speaker 1: backtracking just touch in. In eighteen fifty nine we had
Speaker 1: a Ferdinand car of France who developed an ammonious slash
Speaker 1: water refrigeration machine. Eighteen sixty eight you had Peter van
Speaker 1: der Wide. Uh. He patents thermostatically controlled refrigeration systems. That's
Speaker 1: going to be important when we get to the modern refrigerator.
Speaker 1: Eighteen seventy Carl Lynn publishes a paper called the Extraction
Speaker 1: of Heat at Low Temperature by Mechanical Means, and he
Speaker 1: designs the first practical portable compressor refrigeration machine in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy three. Uh. In eighteen seventy seven, that was the
Speaker 1: peak of the ice trade, so in the US that
Speaker 1: it hit its peak right And the late eighteen seventies
Speaker 1: the United States was exporting almost almost a quarter of
Speaker 1: a million tons of ice to other countries. So uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of ice leaving the United States. Um and uh,
Speaker 1: it's interesting to me that at this point where the
Speaker 1: ice trade is at its peak, but mechanical refrigeration is
Speaker 1: already in its infancy. The only reason that mechanical refrigeration
Speaker 1: even started to take off, it wasn't because the technology
Speaker 1: was getting great. It's because the ice trade was starting
Speaker 1: to encounter problems. Once it gets to about the eight
Speaker 1: nineties or so, like, if the ice trade had not
Speaker 1: encountered problems, then even with the technological advances in mechanical refrigeration,
Speaker 1: we may not have seen refrigerators in the United States
Speaker 1: for another you know, I don't know four or five decades,
Speaker 1: but so, yeah, and that what happened was was that
Speaker 1: as people were essentially mining ice, you know, cutting away
Speaker 1: ice from these rivers and ponds, they were starting to
Speaker 1: uh exhaust the clean sources of water and so more
Speaker 1: and more of the ice. The demand was growing, right,
Speaker 1: and the supply was diminishing. Not that we were running
Speaker 1: out of lakes and rivers and stuff. It's just the
Speaker 1: demand was so great that there wasn't enough to go around. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's not there's only that are frozen, and the Hudson
Speaker 1: is really big and stuff. But yeah, I mean when
Speaker 1: you're talking about a quarter of a million tons, right,
Speaker 1: so you're talking about tons of ice that might have
Speaker 1: things like sewage in Uh, not so great when you're
Speaker 1: using it in the meat packing industry as it not
Speaker 1: maybe not such a big advantage over spoiled meat. Um yeah, so. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's because the ice industry was starting to have these
Speaker 1: issues that we began to see the rise of mechanical refrigeration.
Speaker 1: Was when a trade journal called Ice and Refrigeration began
Speaker 1: to publish. Nineteen o four was when the American Society
Speaker 1: of Refrigerating Engineers was founded. By the way, the American
Speaker 1: Society of Refrigerating Engineers, I learned, was about engineers who
Speaker 1: were experts in refrigeration. It was not a society that
Speaker 1: would actually refrigerate engineers. Because the way it was worded
Speaker 1: it was confusing. I find that difficult to believe, Jonathan.
Speaker 1: I think you should check your sources. American Society of
Speaker 1: Refrigerating Engineer. It does sound like you're just shoving a
Speaker 1: guy with a hard hat into a fridge, and that
Speaker 1: brings us back to American Psycho. Nineteen eleven, General Electric
Speaker 1: introduced the first domestic refrigerator. Depending upon whom you ask, right,
Speaker 1: we should also point out that when we've got these
Speaker 1: dates and saying who brought out the first one, etcetera, etcetera. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's some dispute in them, and it all, like I've
Speaker 1: seen conflicting time. The history and especially uh scientific incorporate
Speaker 1: history tends to be written by the victors and um.
Speaker 1: So therefore sometimes you know, you have in different reports
Speaker 1: differ about exactly who won that right and you know
Speaker 1: exactly n according to some sources, that's the first electric refrigerator.
Speaker 1: According to actually frigid Air's timeline tell you specifically, nineteen
Speaker 1: sixteen was when models like the Kelvinator and Servel were introduced,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen eighteen General Motors purchased Guardian Refrigerator Company
Speaker 1: and renamed it Frigidair. So nineteen eighteen was when frigid
Speaker 1: Air as a thing became a thing like it existed before,
Speaker 1: but it didn't exist in like, it didn't have the
Speaker 1: frigida name. And frigid is where we get the word
Speaker 1: fridge from. I do believe, I believe so. And it's
Speaker 1: also they that's the company that developed free on, which
Speaker 1: we will talk about a little bit in just a moment. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so way up in the nineteen thirties, we've got like
Speaker 1: one other point to cover before then I've got I've
Speaker 1: got a couple more. Actually, because i've got I've got three.
Speaker 1: In the twenties, here we go, Oh goodness. In the
Speaker 1: USA there were about twenty five million domestic refrigerators, only
Speaker 1: seventy thousand of which were mechanical. So these refrigerators, some
Speaker 1: of them were more like the ice box refrigerator. Um.
Speaker 1: I remember, I remember watching like Lassie growing up, that
Speaker 1: that the mom and Lassie had an icebox, not not
Speaker 1: a fridge. Random mom in the last Sie, not the
Speaker 1: mom and Lassie. From all I thought, Lastie had its
Speaker 1: own fridge, and like that dog was luckier than I was.
Speaker 1: Seven was the first porcelain on steel cabinet refrigerator, which
Speaker 1: is that's the one I always think of, like the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties refrigerator, the big porcelain ones. It looks a
Speaker 1: little bit like a rocket. Yeah mine, mind is mind's
Speaker 1: a steel refrigerator. I've got the sameless steel thing going now. So,
Speaker 1: but I don't I remember the one, the porcelain ones. Uh.
Speaker 1: THEE was when Frigidair introduced the first home food freezer,
Speaker 1: and it was a chest style freezer, so you know,
Speaker 1: not the not the upright type, not not incorporated into
Speaker 1: a refrigerator. Um. And that was right around that time
Speaker 1: is when uh, Frigida starts to introduce chloro floral Carbon's right,
Speaker 1: I believe that DuPont had developed it's also called a
Speaker 1: free on. Yeah, that's the patented specific lora flora carbon
Speaker 1: that Frigida introduced. Um. And yeah, before then, UM, some
Speaker 1: of the very early fridges I believe, were you using
Speaker 1: sulfur dioxide, Yeah, sulfur dioxide, methyl chloride, ammonium. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: these are all chemicals that are toxic, toxic, so whenever
Speaker 1: there were accidents, and you know where human accidents happened, uh,
Speaker 1: then uh, sometimes people were really badly injured or even
Speaker 1: they died even as a result of being exposed to
Speaker 1: these sort of chemicals. And so there was a big
Speaker 1: incentive for companies to develop refrigerants that were not toxic.
Speaker 1: And so that was the reason why companies were looking
Speaker 1: into something like a chloral fluora carbon. Now, later on
Speaker 1: we would learn other downsides to chloro fluora carbons, which
Speaker 1: we'll talk about in a second, um, which is why
Speaker 1: we don't use them anymore. Now. In nineteen thirty one,
Speaker 1: that was the first use of free on as a refrigerant,
Speaker 1: So it was kind of introduced in nineteen twenty nine,
Speaker 1: and by it was being incorporated into the design and
Speaker 1: mechanical refrigerators. In the first refrigerator freezer combo with the
Speaker 1: freezer having its own separate section was introduced, so you
Speaker 1: that was where you know, you would open up the
Speaker 1: fridge part or you would open up the freezer part. Um.
Speaker 1: And in nineteen nine, Soviet engineers discovered a way to
Speaker 1: create thermoelectric refrigeration systems using the the Peltier effect by
Speaker 1: using semiconductor material because you know, like I said, those
Speaker 1: pure metals weren't producing enough of an effect for it
Speaker 1: to be useful in any way. They found that by
Speaker 1: using semiconductor materials they could create a temperature differential that
Speaker 1: was effective enough for it to be used for something science.
Speaker 1: So yeah, they actually started creating refrigerators using that thermoelectric
Speaker 1: system rather than the vapor compression system that was being
Speaker 1: used pretty much everywhere else. Also in in ninety nine,
Speaker 1: the business was so booming that seven million refrigerators were
Speaker 1: being produced in the US annually. Nice and in fact,
Speaker 1: my timeline ends at nineteen nine, because I didn't write
Speaker 1: down specifically the bit about the nineteen seventies where right
Speaker 1: around nineteen sent was when we started figuring out the
Speaker 1: chloral fluora carbon we're starting to accumulate in the atmosphere, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and eat through the ozone layer, which is not the
Speaker 1: science for that, that's right, right, but that it was
Speaker 1: it was in fact harming the ozone layer, and that
Speaker 1: was what gave the incentive for us to develop something
Speaker 1: besides that, which is why these days hydrofloor carbons or
Speaker 1: isoputane or yeah, those are the those are the main
Speaker 1: too uh to be used because they don't have the
Speaker 1: same environmental impact nor that they have the same toxicity
Speaker 1: levels as the previous refrigerants before free on. Yeah, ammonia
Speaker 1: and things are still used in industrial capacity because they
Speaker 1: assume that someone who has you know, um, five thousand
Speaker 1: dollars to drop on a refrigerator is going to or
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars more on top of what you would
Speaker 1: normally spend, is going to take a little bit better
Speaker 1: care with the care of it and not you know,
Speaker 1: let the dog eat through the back end. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's one of those things. Also where you're talking about
Speaker 1: efficiency as well. Ammonia is a very efficient refrigerants. So
Speaker 1: that's that's you know, when you're talking about a large
Speaker 1: scale production, efficiency ends up being the difference between a
Speaker 1: profitable year and a disaster. Yeah, especially when you've got
Speaker 1: health inspectors coming through making sure that you do not
Speaker 1: have any food that is entering that danger zone that
Speaker 1: I talked about. Right, So that that kind of brings
Speaker 1: us up to speed to the general refrigerator of today.
Speaker 1: Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay,
Speaker 1: so I think it's time we start talking about the
Speaker 1: actual process of refrigeration and how the modern day refrigerator
Speaker 1: in general works. Do you mean the technology of it,
Speaker 1: like we're like we're at tech as if we were
Speaker 1: talking about the stuff that is techy. So, so you're
Speaker 1: using essentially the refrigerator cooling system is a closed system, right,
Speaker 1: It's a closed system. Think of it as a series
Speaker 1: of tubes, so it's its own Internet, but a series
Speaker 1: of tubes that are all connected to one another. There
Speaker 1: there's no external you know, venting or anything or intake.
Speaker 1: So you've got a system where you're using a refrigerant
Speaker 1: Like we were talking about in those early days. Yes,
Speaker 1: some sort of some some sort of of material that
Speaker 1: at room temperature is a gas. But when you pressurize it,
Speaker 1: you can make it a liquid. And that's the key.
Speaker 1: So Um, if you if you're having trouble understanding how
Speaker 1: this works, think about like you get some rubbing alcohol
Speaker 1: and put a little bit on your skin, and you're
Speaker 1: gonna feel that it it feels very cool. And that's
Speaker 1: not because the rubbing alcohol itself is at a cool temperature. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that the liquid in the bottle, when you hold the bottle,
Speaker 1: it can feel like it's the simply of the same
Speaker 1: temperature as the room. Right. But but the thing is
Speaker 1: that rubbing alcohol will start to evaporate at room temperature.
Speaker 1: So when you put it on your skin, as it evaporates,
Speaker 1: you're gonna feel your skin cool down. That evaporative effect,
Speaker 1: it's as the the liquid is turning into a vapor,
Speaker 1: it's pulling heat. Uh through part of that physical reaction,
Speaker 1: and the reaction the energy that is required to turn
Speaker 1: something from a liquid to a vapor. UM sucks in
Speaker 1: energy heat energy from right around and you've got the
Speaker 1: higher temperature generated by your body. So that's where that
Speaker 1: heat can come from it can pull the heat from
Speaker 1: there to help fuel this reaction. Essentially, again we're kind
Speaker 1: of oversimplifying, but yeah, but we're also not not physicists,
Speaker 1: and so we also don't have visual effects to show
Speaker 1: you what we mean, which makes aside from our own gesticulation,
Speaker 1: which is really only benefiting us. Yes, we can. We
Speaker 1: can also do the safety dance in here. Apparently that's
Speaker 1: that's what looks like whenever I start talking, Um, that's
Speaker 1: just the way I am. But okay, So you've got
Speaker 1: the coolant in your refrigerator, which is called a refrigerant.
Speaker 1: The coolant moves through a series of coils and through
Speaker 1: different parts of the system that the coolant is either
Speaker 1: going to be in a liquid state or a gas state.
Speaker 1: Now you have to think of this system in its
Speaker 1: various parts so on. It's kind of hard to say
Speaker 1: on one end of the system because really, in a way,
Speaker 1: this is kind of like a big circle, So you
Speaker 1: don't have a start and an end. Really, I think
Speaker 1: it's easy to start with that with the compressor compressor.
Speaker 1: So I've got a compressor. The compressor is, of course
Speaker 1: does what it sounds like. It does It compresses compresses
Speaker 1: the gas. So it's uh, well, it compresses the cooling
Speaker 1: at the at the time. Yes, it's a gas, it's
Speaker 1: compressing it. So it's coming in through Uh, it's pulling
Speaker 1: in gas and compressing it. Now, remember we said that
Speaker 1: heat is not a thing that an object possesses. Instead,
Speaker 1: an object possesses some sort of internal energy. So if
Speaker 1: you were to pressurize something like a gas, If you
Speaker 1: were to pressurize a gas, uh, or you were to
Speaker 1: heat up that gas, you would increase the molecular movement
Speaker 1: there and just from being just from observing the gas itself,
Speaker 1: without having any knowledge of how it got that way,
Speaker 1: you would be unable to tell whether it a cheat,
Speaker 1: its internal motion through heat, pressurization, or some combination between
Speaker 1: the two. They would be indistinguishing. Look the same, right,
Speaker 1: So essentially what I'm saying is that compression and heat
Speaker 1: gets you the same result. So you are compressing this
Speaker 1: gas and as a result, the temperature of that gas
Speaker 1: up all right, So you then create this long series
Speaker 1: of coils. This is on the outside of the fridge.
Speaker 1: The compressor is right ready to edge of the fridge.
Speaker 1: It it draws the air in it draws the gas, right, sorry,
Speaker 1: draws the gas from the fridge out to the outside,
Speaker 1: compresses it and then yeah, and then it proceeds up
Speaker 1: through the series of coils coils. Yeah. And you keep
Speaker 1: in mind, like I said, this is totally a closed system.
Speaker 1: This this gas is not exposed to the interior of
Speaker 1: your refrigerator. There's it's always in in tubes essentially, it's
Speaker 1: always in pipes. So it's going through after it gets compressed,
Speaker 1: it's heat heats up. It doesn't it isn't heated up.
Speaker 1: It heats up through the compression. Uh, and then it
Speaker 1: goes through this series of coils. As it goes through
Speaker 1: the series of coils and the outside the refrigerator, it
Speaker 1: starts to lose some of that it you know, the
Speaker 1: heat moves from the coils to the surrounding atmosphere. Right.
Speaker 1: That that that is the purpose of these coils to
Speaker 1: to cool down this air to the point that it's
Speaker 1: going to gas. Okay, I just don't want it to
Speaker 1: be too too vague, but yes, yes, exactly, it's it's
Speaker 1: cooling down the gaseous coolant, right because because at this
Speaker 1: point that that compressed gas is at a higher temperature
Speaker 1: than the ambient air around it. So if you were
Speaker 1: to touch one of these coils, you would feel it
Speaker 1: was very hot. We don't necessarily recommend doing no, don't
Speaker 1: do it. And this also shows that the refrigerator is
Speaker 1: only going to work if it's in an environment that
Speaker 1: is cooler than what the coils are. Like if if
Speaker 1: for some reason you put a refrigerator in the middle
Speaker 1: of a volcano then they degrees, it probably wouldn't do
Speaker 1: well because because then you have the temperature of the
Speaker 1: surrounding environment is higher than the temperature of the coils,
Speaker 1: the heat transfer would move in the opposite direction. Gas
Speaker 1: would never cool down. So so clearly you have to
Speaker 1: have a cooler temperature in your environment. In this case,
Speaker 1: it's in your kitchen, and your kitchen, while even when
Speaker 1: you're cooking full blast feels like it gets pretty warm,
Speaker 1: is nowhere near as hot as those those coils are. First,
Speaker 1: when the gas is compressed, so as it moves through UH,
Speaker 1: it starts to cool down and it begins to condense
Speaker 1: and under that compression, under that pressure, this condensed cooler
Speaker 1: gas becomes a liquid. Because as you increase the pressure
Speaker 1: on a liquid, you also increase its boiling point. So
Speaker 1: if you were to take a uh, let's let's take water. Okay,
Speaker 1: So water boils at two and twelve degrees fahrenheit or
Speaker 1: one hundred degrees celsius, So much easier to talk in
Speaker 1: terms of celsius. Although I'm totally I'm so used to
Speaker 1: everything else being in fahrenheit that water is the only
Speaker 1: thing that makes sense to me in celsius. So, but
Speaker 1: that's because I'm an ignorant American, alright, So uh and
Speaker 1: I'm not saying all Americans are ignorant. I'm saying I
Speaker 1: am so. Anyway, Um, So, at a hundred degrees celsius,
Speaker 1: that's normally when water would boil, right of water under
Speaker 1: one atmosphere of pressure. If you were to increase the
Speaker 1: pressure on that pot of water, Let's say, let's say
Speaker 1: we somehow put a pressure cooker around this, this pressure
Speaker 1: canister around this pot of water and increase the pressure
Speaker 1: on that water. That would also increase the boiling point.
Speaker 1: So you would actually have to go over a hundred
Speaker 1: degrees celsius in order to get that water to boil.
Speaker 1: The same sort of idea here, you've got this compressed gas,
Speaker 1: you've got condensed down into a liquid. That means the
Speaker 1: boiling point has gone up. So as long as that
Speaker 1: that liquid is under pressure, the boiling point is higher
Speaker 1: than it normally would be. That's why it can be
Speaker 1: a liquid. All right. So you've got this liquid it
Speaker 1: would normally be a gas at this temperature. How do
Speaker 1: you make this liquid suddenly magically make everything cool again? Well,
Speaker 1: you've got to have a valve, an expansion valve Jule
Speaker 1: Thompson or our Juel Kelvin, depending on on how how
Speaker 1: you want to say. Uh, Lord Kelvin, Lord Kelvin, Yes,
Speaker 1: came up with this with this ingenious little valve concept
Speaker 1: where if you have a high pressure liquid on one
Speaker 1: side and a very tiny hole and a low pressure
Speaker 1: area on the other side, stuff happens. Right. What happens
Speaker 1: is that liquid will pass through that expansion valve once
Speaker 1: it gets to the area of low pressure. Now you
Speaker 1: don't have the pressure on there anymore. Once the pressure
Speaker 1: is gone, that boiling point goes back down to where
Speaker 1: it normally would be. Now again, with the refrigerants you're
Speaker 1: using in the refrigerator, that boiling point is way lower
Speaker 1: than room temperature. Yeah, yeah, negative twenty eight degrees fahrenheit
Speaker 1: or negative thirty three degrees celsius. So that's when this
Speaker 1: liquid would normally boil off into a gas. Okay, here's
Speaker 1: the other the cool thing about boiling points. Let's say
Speaker 1: that you are magically inside an oven. Don't ask me
Speaker 1: why you went in there, but you're okay, for some
Speaker 1: of you, you're very heat resistant. Okay. Now you've got
Speaker 1: you have that pot of water from the pressure experiment earlier,
Speaker 1: because you don't like to waste, right, so especially not water.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a precious resource. So you've you've taken
Speaker 1: that pot of water with you into the oven, and
Speaker 1: you're watching the water and the temperature inside the oven
Speaker 1: is four hundred degrees and you're watching the water boil,
Speaker 1: and you you have a thermometer inside the water. It
Speaker 1: doesn't have any contact with the metal or anything. It's
Speaker 1: just measuring the temperature of the water. The temperature of
Speaker 1: the water. Even though the oven is four hundred degrees temperature,
Speaker 1: the water is still going to be assuming regular pressure
Speaker 1: two twelve degrees fahrenheit one degrees celsius, because that water
Speaker 1: cannot physically cannot go above that temperature. Not not a
Speaker 1: liquid form, no because as when you're in liquid form,
Speaker 1: you can go only up as high as the boiling
Speaker 1: point and then you turn into again. So so the
Speaker 1: water itself is at one hundred degrees celsius so to you,
Speaker 1: because you know you're in the four hundred degree air,
Speaker 1: to you, the water would actually seem cold, right. So
Speaker 1: that's the whole idea is that once it goes down
Speaker 1: to this boiling point, the temperature actually drops dramatically. So
Speaker 1: it goes through the expansion valve. The liquid, the highly
Speaker 1: pressurized liquid, goes through this expansion valve, hits the area
Speaker 1: of low pressure, immediately boils off and because most of it,
Speaker 1: from what I've read about half of it boils off. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: because again you're getting into this low pressure system, which
Speaker 1: means that now that that uh that it's no longer
Speaker 1: confined by the high pressure, which means now it can
Speaker 1: it can boil off into its vapor form, which means
Speaker 1: that it starts pulling in the heat to essentially be
Speaker 1: part of this uh this uh this process. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as as the process happens, it pulls in heat necessarily
Speaker 1: because that is where the energy for the process comes from.
Speaker 1: So what what that means for your refrigerator. Is that
Speaker 1: the interior of your refrigerator, all the heat that's contained
Speaker 1: within the interior brigerator moves to these sucked into the pipes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that the same series, the same source series of
Speaker 1: coils that you would find on the outside of refrigerator,
Speaker 1: something similar to that is on the inside of your refrigerator,
Speaker 1: only there, instead of putting heat out, it's pulling heat in.
Speaker 1: Because it's pulling heat in from the interior of your
Speaker 1: your refrigerator and freezer. There's just there's really just more
Speaker 1: length of it and your freezer than there is in
Speaker 1: your refrigerator. That's the difference there. Yeah, so so so yeah,
Speaker 1: this liquid, this half liquid half gas, is running through
Speaker 1: the coils inside the body of the fridge, and fans
Speaker 1: are blowing air across the coils through the food part
Speaker 1: of the fridge, which which continues to to vaporize the
Speaker 1: rest of the liquid into gas and continues to pull
Speaker 1: more heat, more heat. Yep. And that's what makes the
Speaker 1: refrigerator cold. So really it's not that it's not that
Speaker 1: the refrigerators pushing cold in, it's pulling heat out. So
Speaker 1: that's something because I mean, which is so cool Yeah,
Speaker 1: when you open up refrigerator and you feel that little
Speaker 1: blast of cold air, you just think, oh, there's something
Speaker 1: magically Yeah, that's not what's happening. So but it is
Speaker 1: really neat to think about that that's all going on
Speaker 1: at the same time. So you're really you're talking about
Speaker 1: too closed systems. The closed system of the interior of
Speaker 1: the refrigerator where all your food is, and the closed
Speaker 1: system of the actual coolant that's moving through And um, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's the basic idea. Oh and once it gets
Speaker 1: once the gas gets to the end of that part
Speaker 1: of the cycle, you know it's it's completely in gas form,
Speaker 1: it's no longer pressurized. That's when the compressor pulls that
Speaker 1: gas through to move it all the way through the
Speaker 1: system again. So it's reusing the same coolant over and
Speaker 1: over and over again with with no waste. Right, assuming
Speaker 1: there are no leaks in the system, you're good to go.
Speaker 1: If you've ever had to have a refrigerator or freezer unit,
Speaker 1: if you had to have coolant added to it, this
Speaker 1: happens frequently I've seen with air conditioning systems, uh climate systems.
Speaker 1: Then that means there's probably there has to be a
Speaker 1: leak somewhere in there because it is a closed system,
Speaker 1: and otherwise you shouldn't really have any loss, at least
Speaker 1: not any appreciable loss. Yeah. So that's the basic way
Speaker 1: of fridge works. I find it super interesting. I almost
Speaker 1: said cool, I almost did it. I almost said I
Speaker 1: didn't want to do that. I think, did I do
Speaker 1: that a second ago? I apologize. I apologize for accidental
Speaker 1: puns guys, But uh, you might be wondering, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: my refrigerator allows me to set a temperature, right like
Speaker 1: I can choose to either go super cold. Yeah, for
Speaker 1: for my freezer, I wanted to be as cold as possible.
Speaker 1: Or you might think, well, no, that's gonna use up
Speaker 1: a lot of energy. I'm gonna be a little When
Speaker 1: when when the stuff in your cheese rawery starting to
Speaker 1: frost over and you start going like, yeah, this is bad.
Speaker 1: So what what governs that is what's called a thermo couple,
Speaker 1: which is essentially a thermometer and a switch. So the
Speaker 1: thermometer detects the temperature the interior of the refrigerator, and
Speaker 1: when it drops below whatever the temperature is set to,
Speaker 1: it turns off electricity to the compressor, so the compressor stops,
Speaker 1: which means this whole cycle that we've been talking about stops,
Speaker 1: and then if the temperature creeps up above it again,
Speaker 1: it turns electricity back on. Yeah. So that's when if
Speaker 1: you've ever heard your refrigerator just kind of kick on,
Speaker 1: that's what's going on in you know. The more modern
Speaker 1: ones do this really efficiently, so you don't have it
Speaker 1: happen as frequently or as dramatically. I remember an old
Speaker 1: refrigerator I had where you thought that, you know, perhaps
Speaker 1: Steven Spielberg was filming Poltergeist for in your kitchen every
Speaker 1: time I kicked in. Yeah. Modern fridges also do contain small,
Speaker 1: low wattage heaters which just keeps the evaporator coils at
Speaker 1: the correct temperature and not frosted over um, which which
Speaker 1: I find also fascinating. Just yeah, like like fridges contain heaters,
Speaker 1: that's the thing that they do. Yeah, And you know,
Speaker 1: obviously refrigerators can have lots of other bells and whistles
Speaker 1: on them. Of course. Sometimes literally, my my refrigerator does ding,
Speaker 1: uh if I like, if I am using the there
Speaker 1: has a water dispenser, right, so it intakes water from
Speaker 1: my my house's water system and puts it through a filter,
Speaker 1: and then I can get a nice clean glass of water.
Speaker 1: But if you open up a the other door, it's
Speaker 1: a it's a double door refrigerator. Do you open up
Speaker 1: the other door, it cuts the water off. You can't.
Speaker 1: You can't dispense water while the door is open, and
Speaker 1: if you have depressed the water dispenser, it will bring
Speaker 1: at you and mercilessly chide you for trying to do
Speaker 1: two things that are not compatible. Because I frequently forget
Speaker 1: while I'm getting a glass of water. I'm thinking, you
Speaker 1: know what would go great with this water, That enormous
Speaker 1: hunk of cheese that's in my refrigerator, and then my
Speaker 1: refrigerator tells me that, yes, indeed, that would be lovely.
Speaker 1: But you need to wait until you've either gotten the
Speaker 1: cheese or finished getting your glass of water. You cannot
Speaker 1: do both at the same time. That's great. I love
Speaker 1: it with electronics. Chide man. By love, I mean hate,
Speaker 1: I hate that thing well. And there are other kind
Speaker 1: of interesting like additions you can get. LG has a
Speaker 1: beer chiller. That's so, this is this thing. I actually
Speaker 1: got to see this in person at the one like
Speaker 1: the innovator or yes, it did. It did. It won
Speaker 1: one of the Innovation awards. Uh and uh so this
Speaker 1: is like a tiny little thing chamber within the refrigerator
Speaker 1: part itself. It's called a blast chiller. Yeah, it's designed
Speaker 1: it's designed to take a well, the demo was a
Speaker 1: can of beer from room temperature to ice cold within
Speaker 1: about five minutes. And uh and essentially it's doing the
Speaker 1: same process we talked about right here. It's just that
Speaker 1: I imagine there are more of those coils. It's a
Speaker 1: very small chamber and very controlled. Yeah, there's their fans involved.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's they're they're they're trying to increase
Speaker 1: the circulation of air and the h and the surface
Speaker 1: area that the cold coils have so that it pulls
Speaker 1: heat as efficiently as possible, so that you can have
Speaker 1: your frosty beverage when you want it, or at least
Speaker 1: five minutes after you thought about it. Um. And that's
Speaker 1: assuming you want one can. If you want to, it's
Speaker 1: gonna take about eight minutes because it's more for it
Speaker 1: to more heat for it to disperse. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's stuff like that, and then they're smart refrigerators. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: now you can you can have your fridge tell you
Speaker 1: what's in it and what kind of recipes you can
Speaker 1: make with that, and yeah, and send information to other
Speaker 1: elements in your home, assuming that they are made by
Speaker 1: the same company and are compatible, are willing to talk
Speaker 1: to each other. Yeah. So the the idea here, of course,
Speaker 1: is that it's not a new idea. It's one of
Speaker 1: those things that people have been trying various to implement
Speaker 1: in various ways. But now that we have smartphones, it's
Speaker 1: a little bit it's a little easier, Yeah, because you
Speaker 1: can you can connect a smartphone to a refrigerator and
Speaker 1: scan things in that way. That was that was the
Speaker 1: big issue, right, was that how do you tell a
Speaker 1: refrigerator what's inside of it? If you have to stay
Speaker 1: in there and manually input onto probably a really miserable
Speaker 1: touch pad on the refrigerators surface, exactly like how many
Speaker 1: bananas you have? I don't. I never want to do that.
Speaker 1: I don't put bananas in the refrigerator. I do not. Thinking. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: Foco bomb, I've found your problem. Uh no, but you
Speaker 1: are you are correct that that's that's the barrier, right,
Speaker 1: How do you make it so easy. And you know,
Speaker 1: there were people who are talking about, why don't you
Speaker 1: put r F I D chips and or strips of
Speaker 1: some sort onto various products and then you could just
Speaker 1: have it scanned when you put it in. But then
Speaker 1: other people were saying, wait, if you have r F
Speaker 1: I D chips, you can end up tracking everything that
Speaker 1: someone buys, whether they want to be part of a customer,
Speaker 1: you know, or not. Yeah, and there are people who
Speaker 1: are very sensitive about that, and I can completely understand.
Speaker 1: You know, I personally I don't worry about it that much,
Speaker 1: but that's just because that's who I am. I'm waiting
Speaker 1: to do it so that I can get sent yogurt coupon, right,
Speaker 1: you know. But but I'm I totally understand the people
Speaker 1: who are like, no one has any business knowing what
Speaker 1: I buy. I go out and I buy it. I
Speaker 1: buy it with my money. It's my exchange. That's all that.
Speaker 1: That's where it should end. And I totally respect that.
Speaker 1: But so that that the r F I D thing
Speaker 1: never really I mean, I've seen some implementations of it,
Speaker 1: but I don't expect that off the ground. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: it would also require the entire food industry to change, right,
Speaker 1: all the packaging would have to change. And that's when
Speaker 1: you look at that across every single company that makes
Speaker 1: food that's designed to go into a refrigerator. That's a
Speaker 1: lot of money that that would require billions of dollars
Speaker 1: of investment from various companies. Yeah, for for relatively low
Speaker 1: usage point, I think, yeah, especially right now because we're
Speaker 1: talking about you know, right now, I don't think there
Speaker 1: are that many people who have smart refrigerators, and again,
Speaker 1: like to get one that's really useful that can work
Speaker 1: with something else. Like say you're your oven so that
Speaker 1: you know, you pull up a recipe on your refrigerator
Speaker 1: and it's it's telling you what you can make based
Speaker 1: upon the ingredients that you that it knows that you
Speaker 1: have available, and you say, yes, that's what I want.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna make a chicken ala king, and you have
Speaker 1: pushed the button, and then it could actually again if
Speaker 1: it's part of this, this sort of network system could
Speaker 1: send information to the oven so that the oven starts
Speaker 1: to preheat to the correct temperature to make chicken ala king,
Speaker 1: right while you are actually pulling the materials out so
Speaker 1: that you can prep them for for cooking. So this way,
Speaker 1: it ends up making the whole experience more of fishing
Speaker 1: and could even potentially, uh, you know, send another note
Speaker 1: out to your cell phone the next time that you're
Speaker 1: in a shopping market and and say, hey, by the way,
Speaker 1: you really like this one thing because you but you
Speaker 1: made it like fourteen times in the last two months,
Speaker 1: but maybe you want it again, or or maybe you're
Speaker 1: out of chicken, uh, and we're planning on doing something
Speaker 1: else later this week. Maybe you need to buy more chicken. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it just tells you go out there and buy more chicken. Now.
Speaker 1: The the thing that I find interesting is that we're
Speaker 1: talking about this. These are kind of future applications. They're
Speaker 1: really coming into practice now, uh, and we'll probably see
Speaker 1: more of that in the next maybe five or ten years.
Speaker 1: It's gonna take a while before this technology to to
Speaker 1: get out there far enough for it to be pervasive.
Speaker 1: Especially you know, once you buy a big appliance like
Speaker 1: a refrigerator, you want that to last for a while,
Speaker 1: not something you replace every couple of years, thirty year
Speaker 1: kind of can it definitely can't be. So I think
Speaker 1: this is one of those those things that we're gonna
Speaker 1: see kind of played around with like high end homes
Speaker 1: and that kind of stuff. I don't I don't imagine
Speaker 1: I'll be buying a smart frigerator anytime the near future
Speaker 1: unless I just when the lottery or something. I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't know what else to do with everyone, right,
Speaker 1: like just knock on random doors, guess what you want today? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know otherwise, but it is interesting to me
Speaker 1: because I sit there and I think about the time
Speaker 1: back when people were like, well, we could buy a
Speaker 1: mechanical refrigerator, but ice is so available, so who knows
Speaker 1: what will happen? Um anyway, So that's that's how refrigerators work.
Speaker 1: This was a particularly fun episode to kind of talk about.
Speaker 1: We haven't done a how something works episode in this
Speaker 1: kind of level for a while, and uh, and we
Speaker 1: really do enjoy doing them. There they are challenging, so
Speaker 1: but we we enjoy the challenge. So, guys, fans, you know,
Speaker 1: I love you that you just had a moment with
Speaker 1: the microphone. That was very that that was very sweet.
Speaker 1: He was He meant it when he said that, everybody.
Speaker 1: But yeah, So so if you have suggestions for episod
Speaker 1: zodes of future text stuff, extravaganza type stuff. Let us
Speaker 1: know you get in touch with us, send us an email,
Speaker 1: Our addresses tech Stuff at Discovery dot com, or let
Speaker 1: us know on Facebook. Our Twitter are handled there as
Speaker 1: tech Stuff hs W. Also keep in mind episode five
Speaker 1: hundred of tech Stuff is coming up very soon, so
Speaker 1: if you have a suggestion that we need to cover
Speaker 1: in that episode five, definitely let us know, and Lauren
Speaker 1: and I will talk to you again really soon. For
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com.