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