Refrigeration: A History

For thousands of years, humans coped with heat by harvesting and storing natural ice and devising natural cooling systems that utilized ventilation and evaporation. By the mid 1800s, people began developing huge refrigeration machines to manufacture ice. By the early 1900s, engineers developed electric domestic refrigerators, which by 1927 were affordable convenient household appliances.

By then, an increasingly sophisticated public demanded more modern-looking appliances than engineers co...