The History of Refrigeration

27:09And then it passes through this other thing, like I think a condenser, and that gives off the waste heat. That's what's under your fridge. And then like the evaporator cools everything down. And I finally got it, Chuck. Okay. So I've been looking at it wrong the whole way. The refrigerator doesn't pump cold into your fridge, right the the actual mechanical refrigerant process what it does is it sucks heat out of your refrigerator and once i finally understood that i was like i i got it finally i got it because this cooler um refrigerant goes through a coil and i thought like it was emitting cold and that that's how it cooled down now it's drawing any heat from there kind of tricking the heat into joining the coil and leaving the fridge box cooler, which is what that refrigerant wanted all the time.

28:04It thinks that the heat was a sucker for falling for it, but that's exactly what it does every time. And now the inside of your refrigerator is way colder. Amazing. I think it's kind of amazing too, because it's the opposite of what I always thought was going on. Yeah, that's super cool. I love that stuff. They've used various liquids over the years. Ammonia is one they use for a while. methyl chloride for a while. All of these things were toxic, though. So until they figured out a safer way, which, you know, they would soon enough, people would actually die. In the 1920s, there were cases where methyl chloride leaks happened, actually killed people.

28:41And then they said, you know what, maybe we should come up with a synthetic substance that does basically the same thing. So they came up with dichlorofluoromethane, a.k.a. freon. And until the 1990s, freon was the go-to. And then we said, hey, that's not so great either because of our environment and the ozone layer. And so let's develop even newer, safer chemicals to keep things cool. Yeah, which hydrofluorocarbons are good for the ozone layer, but they're actually horrible as greenhouse gases. There's a rating of just how much of an effect like a chemical has on warming the atmosphere. And they use carbon dioxide, CO2, as a one.

29:24That's like the baseline because we know how much it warms the atmosphere over 100 years. So it has a global warming potential or GWP of one. Carbon dioxide does. Hydrofluorocarbons have a global warming potential of 14 ,800. Wow. That's a lot more than CO2 if you really stop and think about it. And these are the refrigerants we're still using. These are the alternatives that we developed and started using in the 90s. So it's like we go from the frying pan into the fire whenever we try to do something environmental, it feels like. Yeah, that's probably true. To me, this is where this episode gets super interesting.

30:05And this is kind of what I was really after when it came to the assignment, which is when things started moving around. Cooling systems started getting better and better. People were developing this stuff. And at the same time, railroads were growing and growing and expanding and expanding. And all of a sudden, people in the Midwest, farmers could, you know, they were like, hey, I want to be able to ship my stuff and sell it to the East Coast. So the whole food scene was changing because of this. In the 1850s, they started, and this to me is just like super ingenious, they started keeping railroad cars cool by using ice.

30:45So they were called reefers, R-E-E-F-E-R. A reefer was a refrigerated rail car. And they had these big hatches in the roof. They would load just these huge, huge blocks of ice. And then fans that were driven by, you know, powered by the turning of the axle on the train, or on the train car, rather. And that just, you know, it just blew on them like a breeze past a cool towel in your window. And all of a sudden, you had refrigerated train cars. They were lined in like flax and sawdust, like we mentioned, sometimes dirt, sometimes cow hair. And even though people were a little bit at first like, I don't know about this, the meat packing industry really got on board because they said, we've been shipping live cows across country for people to take care of when they get there.

31:34When we can butcher everything in one place and ship out this, what they call dead meat. It's disgusting, but that's what they called it. Right. Right. That's what sixth grade bullies call you, too, when they tell you to meet them in the playground at three. Dead meat. But that changed absolutely everything. This is when meat became like a staple of the American diet. We talked a little bit about Chicago being the epicenter of this and that what did Americans eat before the FDA came along or something like that? Yeah, that's right. But all of a sudden, meat was much easier, much cheaper to ship, and they could ship it further and further.

32:11So they started supplying the cities with meat and people started to be able to afford it. And that just that was another huge change, not just for humans, but for cows, too, because apparently the cow population in the United States more than doubled in 30 years after we figured out how to refrigerate meat or ship refrigerated meat. Yeah. Yeah, that's incredible. That's a lot of cows. Yeah, it's a lot of dead cows. It completely changed Chicago as a city, and it completely changed the way we were eating as a nation all of a sudden. You had refrigerated cars also shipping produce. It wasn't just about the cows and the beef, even though it was a big part of it.

32:55But all of a sudden, you could be like, hey, I'm growing this fruit in Florida, and have you ever had not just an orange in your stocking for Christmas? You ever had a big bag of oranges sitting around your house? Well, we're happy to provide that for you. And U.S. Fruit, I think, was one of the first companies to get involved in, like, sending their good stuff all over the place. And, you know, as a result, obviously, the prices really, really dropped. There was an article in The New York Sun in 1894 that talked about the price of pears went from 40 cents to two for a nickel in just a couple of decades, thanks to refrigerated cars.

33:31It's even more impressive when you adjust for inflation. So a single pair was$11 in the 1870s, and they were two for$1.80 in the 1890s, thanks to refrigeration. Did you ever get an orange in the bottom of your Christmas stocking? Because I never understood why until I started researching this. You never did? Oh, we always did, and I was always like, why is there an orange in the bottom of this stocking, making it seem like there's way more stuff in here than there actually is. I feel like I would remember that our stockings were a couple of little fun things, like a little top or some silly putty, but usually just like socks and stuff like that.

34:12Sure. I'm guessing that the reason I did and you didn't is because I was raised in the north, the Midwest. Maybe. I'll bet that's why. And so it was like a like a Midwestern tradition because we didn't have access to oranges and you could eat an orange year round. Basically, you lucky duck. Like trains eventually shipping wise gave way to trucks and they said, hey, now we got these trucks that we can, you know, refrigerate as well. And so we're not, you know, things were built around industries, entire industries, separate industries were built near rail yards because rail shipping was the only only game, you know, for a long time.

34:51So and I think it was in the net. What did we eat episode when we talked about Chicago, like the whole meatpacking area was around the rail yards because they could, you know, they want to have it super close. So now all of a sudden you could say, hey, stuff is, you know, it's really much cheaper to raise cattle or grow vegetables way out in the boonies. You get cheaper labor, cheaper land. So now we can do that and just throw it on a refrigerated truck to get it across country. Yep. So Chuck, little by little as these like innovations in shipping stuff, meat, produce, things that just could not make it from, you know, California to, oh, I don't know, let's say Denver.

35:30Okay. without rotting or something. As we got better and better at this, something called the cold chain started to emerge and evolve. And that was basically how we move perishable items from one part of the country to another, thanks to this refrigerated stuff. And it was super primitive and separate. I think the, I don't know if you said it or not, but the very first private rail cars were these meat packers, refrigerated cars. They just did this on their own as like a great business move. But these things became so invaluable and people became so hooked on having stuff available year round that they normally wouldn't that it just became an institution, like a part of any growing, developing country's infrastructure.

36:15There was something called the cold chain. Yeah, absolutely. There was an engineer early on who did not realize his dream, but he was sort of the first visionary in the mid 19th century. His name was Charles Tellier. Ooh, nailed it. He was the guy that kind of envisioned this and said, hey, the cold chain is a thing that we could make a reality. And then we can sort of reorganize rationally on how we grow food and how we ship food. And it was his idea. He apparently died in extreme poverty because he never realized the dream to its fullest. But he tried. He actually got a British steamer ship and outfitted it with a refrigerator, even named it Le Frigurique.

37:06Yeah, like fantastic, basically, but fantastic refrigerator is basically what it means. Yeah, that sounds like a magnificent product. Like magnifique, but refrigerator. The fantastic refrigerator concern. And this was in 1877, and he was bringing beef across the ocean from Uruguay to Paris. And when they got there, he was like, everyone's going to love this. And the French were like, you think I'm eating meat that's been dead for a month? Yeah. You're crazy, and we're going to pass a bunch of laws that ban this kind of thing for the next 20 years. Until you're screeched, I'm not crazy. Shut up.

37:45Take it back. Yeah, exactly. So like you said, he died penniless, as you like to say. But his legacy lived on. Eventually people said like, okay, we can get used to this. But it took some selling for sure. One of the other major things that helped establish the cold chain was not just shipping, but it had to like sit for a little while when it got to where it's going. Like, it's not like the train stopped at every house for anyone who wanted eggs. Like, it went to one central destination and it unloaded its contents. And so, as a result, cold storage had to develop. You remember Rocky? He helped train by punching huge sides of beef.

38:33That was part of the cold chain. He worked in, at least, I guess that's where he worked, was a cold storage place? uh yeah yeah like a meatpacker storage facility i think um by the way second rocky reference in here there was another very subtle one we'll see if the listeners can pick that out it already happened yeah yeah a little easter egg i didn't pick it out i want to know all right i'm going to tell you off air ready i'll tell you right now

39:07Oh! Okay. Thank you for telling me. It sounded like you were acting just then. Then you kind of were, but I really did just tell Josh. But, yes, let's leave that as an Easter egg. Anyway, yeah, cold warehouses started becoming a thing. Again, that sawdust insulation provided a lot of the, you know, insulation, I guess. These were in the 1860s, and, you know, it wasn't like your refrigerator cold, but they were storing, like, fruit and produce. So, basically, it was like, hey, you don't get too warm and spoil is what they were trying to, you know, accomplish there. Yeah, it didn't have to be frozen necessarily.

39:47No, no, no. But by 1904, this was a legitimate thing. There were more than 600 huge storage, you know, cold storage facilities. I think 102 million cubic feet and, you know, mainly based around cities. But they were holding everything from, you know, produce to namely eggs because people wanted their eggs year round. And back then, before they started breeding chickens to lay eggs year round, they were basically laying in the spring. And people wanted those eggs in the winter. Yeah, and they really did breed them, Chuck, through selective breeding programs. There's something called the red jungle fowl, which is a type of chicken, wild chicken.

40:23It lays about 10 to 15 eggs per year. And like you said, normally in the spring, maybe in the early summer, that's just not enough if you want eggs year round. So the breeds that we developed, like the leghorns, which is the top egg layer, the champ, they lay about 350 eggs per year, year round. That's a lot. But before that, yeah, you could just hang on to eggs. I almost said you could just sit on eggs for a while thanks to cold storage. That's right. But, you know, we said the French were kind of grossed out by this. It wasn't just the French. A lot of people had a hard time kind of coming around to this idea of eating things that had been around for a while.

41:04And false rumors spread that, you know, that stuff could make you sick. It could cause cancer. So in 1911, as a PR rebuttal, I guess, the Poultry Butter and Egg Association had a cold storage banquet at the Hotel Sherman in Chicago, where they served an entire meal of foods that had been preserved through refrigeration to a lot of folks, including the mayor and the health commissioner. It's sort of like, hey, here's where we are now. You don't need to be grossed out. And people said, OK, I may not be grossed out, but I'm also like I have to get used to the idea of not buying the eggs from the farmer down the street or getting my milk from down the street or the produce from the farmer down the street.

41:45And so it took a while for people to come around to just getting food away from a source they really sort of knew personally and trusted. Yeah, and that was one of the roles of the FDA and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was to basically say, okay, we get why you don't trust some of these people because some of them are actual total skells, some of the people selling food. Apparently, one technique was to, if you had a bunch of meat that was about to spoil, you just froze it and shipped it, and the person wouldn't be able to tell until they thawed the meat out and tried to sell it, and you just ripped them off.

42:18That was a big one. Or if you had a cold storage facility, if you're storing something for months, you need to keep it cold for months. There can't be like a week where everything breaks down and you just hang on to that stuff and sell it anyway after things get back online. And this was the kind of thing that like people in the U.S. were having to worry about. So thanks to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and then later on actual laws that gave it teeth that kind of helped set the stage for people to finally relax and be like, OK, I can deal with frozen food because it was like the GMOs of its day.

42:55Like people were just like, it'll give you cancer if you eat frozen food. Like it was like people did not trust food that had been frozen. That's right. We should take our second break here at minute 42, and we're going to come back finally with home refrigeration right after this.

43:26Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been unimaginable without AI, and now will happen.

44:00I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents in small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

44:30About insomnia or alluminia. How about the one on borderline disorder? Better yet, birth order. Heard that one before, but it was so nice. I learned it twice. Everybody listen up. Oh, it's Charles and Joshua. It's stuff. It's stuff. It's stuff. You should know. All right. So iceboxes had been a thing since, you know, at least the 19th century. They started to become more and more common. And this is, you know, a big wooden sort of cabinet in your kitchen, usually wood. And it was lined with something like a tin lining or zinc, maybe. And the ice man would come around, deliver a big block of ice to your house.

45:23And that's how things were kept cool in the icebox. And if you are a Gen Xer or older, your grandparents may have even said the word icebox. My grandmother certainly did because she lived to be 100 and was around when they were iceboxes. Right, not just call them. Yeah, there's also that whole excellent subgenre of desserts that are icebox, like icebox cakes. Yeah, yeah, lemon icebox pie. But finally in 1914, we get our first mechanical refrigerator in the house. the Domestic Electric Refrigerator, or the D-O-M-E-L-R-E fridge, made its debut. And this was still not a fully integrated refrigerator.

46:06It was a device that you got to put in your icebox to keep things cool and to keep that ice from melting. So, yeah, it didn't take off. They weren't super reliable. They were pretty expensive. But not too long later, a decade or so later, in 1927, GE introduced its refrigerator. It's nicknamed the monitor top because there's a big round turret on top of the refrigerator that gives it a very distinctive look. It looks like a robot fashioned by like a sixth grader. But monitor refers to the Civil War ironclad USS monitor. And that's just that was the nickname. I was looking all over for what General Electric called it, and they seem to have just called it refrigerator.

46:52Yeah, it's kind of cool looking if you want to look up a photo. I mean, it looks as described. Leftovers, and this was something I was really curious about, that had been a thing. It was 1878, I think, when that term was coined. But leftovers back then meant, like, you got to eat this stuff the next day because people didn't want their food to go bad. People didn't waste stuff like they do now and just throw stuff away if they didn't eat it. So dinner went into the breakfast or the lunch or it went into a big pot the next day that was on the stove. And you just had these big sort of stews of leftover things.

47:30Now that you had the mechanical electric refrigerator, all of a sudden you could preserve stuff and you could serve. You didn't have to transform something. You could like warm up and serve the same meal that you ate a few days ago. So and that was a pretty radical thing at the time. Oh, yeah, for sure. Again, though, people were kind of like, I don't know about this. I was about to say fortunately, but related to that scarcity during World War Two and World War One, but also the Great Depression basically said, hey, everybody, you can't just like be throwing food away. Like we need to be very thrifty with food.

48:07And that really kind of gave leftovers a big boost also because the government came in and created propaganda campaigns to kind of persuade people to start eating leftovers more. Because, again, thanks to your new handy GE refrigerator, you can do that kind of thing. That's right. It's pretty great. You know, the cold chain is what what really changed the game early on. But it also changed, like, not just availability, but, like, literally creating new kinds of foods, like inventing new foods. Iceberg lettuce is so named because it could hold up to being shipped on ice. And it has the same taste as an iceberg.

48:48Hey, man, I'll go to bat for iceberg lettuce. Really? Really? Yeah, I think it's unfairly labeled as junk. and like iceberg in with some arugula and a little romaine and some leafy greens. Throw in a little iceberg because it's so crunchy. Sure. And you don't get that kind of texture from, I mean, maybe a little bit, but it's the crunchiest lettuce to me. So I think it gets a very snobby sort of people look down on it for bad reasons is my take. But I like a little iceberg. Tell them what John Waters called iceberg lettuce. I thought that was great. The polyester of lettuce. Yeah. But I was also raised a, you know, lower middle class kid who grew up eating iceberg lettuce.

49:34Okay. I was too. It has a fond place in my heart for that reason. I understand. I hated salad. So maybe that's why I hate iceberg lettuce. Because that's all we got was iceberg as well and like French dressing or something like that or ranch. And that was it. And you ate it and you liked it and you shut up about it. I would party on an old school 80s iceberg salad so hard. For real? Like even when you were a kid, you would eat that? Yeah. I mean, that's the only kind of, you know, I mean, it's probably not even a vegetable, but I considered it a vegetable. I didn't like a lot of vegetables, but I would eat a salad.

50:10So that's funny. I hated salad so much. I would refuse to be served anything except for some iceberg lettuce and some carrots. And I wouldn't even eat that. No salad dressing, nothing. Like whenever everyone else was finished, if I was still eating my salad, I had to stay at the table and finish it. And so at that time, I would just start slowly putting it bite by bite under the credenza behind me. But then I was short-sighted enough, I didn't go back and clean it out. So every few months, like the credenza would get moved and there'd be a pile of like desiccated iceberg lettuce and carrots. The other thing I like to use iceberg for now is like if you're making something in a lettuce cup, iceberg works really well.

50:47Okay. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. Like chicken larb or something like that. Totally. I'll agree with you on that. So frozen foods obviously wasn't a thing for a long, long time. But finally in the 1950s, they said, hey, you know what? We can cool things. We can freeze things. We can freeze meals. And we can freeze orange juice. And I know we've already talked about TV dinners and frozen concentrate orange juice. But those were two really big game changers only made possible for advances in refrigeration and freezing and chipping. Yeah. And while we're on it, I believe in our like food origins episode.

51:27I don't remember what it was, but we talked about the TV dinner and we totally credited Jerry Thomas, a salesman for Swanson, is coming up with the idea. and since then it's become much clearer that Jerry Thomas might have had almost nothing to do with this and that the real hero was a 21 year old bacteriologist named Betty Cronin who was the one who not only she might not have come up with the idea I think she said one of the Swanson sons did but she was the one who figured out how to make it work and to make these meals that are different foods entirely that all cook at the same time and come out the way that they're supposed to That was all her.

52:08That's right. Betty Cronin, unsurprisingly, not forgotten, but doesn't get nearly the accolades she should have gotten. No. She does now, though. Yeah, way to correct the record, friend. So, yeah, TV dinners. I mean, I would go listen to that episode. It was pretty great. But it definitely came along as TV was coming along. And it was a big deal. And even though, I mean, there are still TV dinners sort of like that. But if you go in the frozen food, I mean, I don't get any of this stuff, but if you go to the frozen food section, I mean, you can get almost any kind of meal frozen these days. Yeah, even iceberg lettuce.

52:48It's like, do it. Oh, yeah. That's not what that means anymore. Oh, no. I'm not going to let someone ruin hocking up a loogie for everybody. That's one of life's great pleasure. Sure. There's one other thing I wanted to mention. So the cold chain is now so diverse and there's so many different versions of it all working together. It's now called the cold web. And Livia gives a great example of what we can do now. We can catch a fish in Norway, send it off to China for processing, and then send it from China to the United States for eating. Wow. All within a half an hour. That's amazing. Well, maybe longer than that, but still, it is still amazing.

53:33You got anything else? You should do an episode on gullibility. Nice idea. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I got 10, 12 more minutes worth of material. Do you mind just sitting there? No, let's do it. Since Chuck said let's do it, I think it's time for listener mail.

53:53This is about the pink house. Hey, guys, I can't believe there is finally a subject I can share some information about. Every year I would visit my cousins who live about 20 minutes away from Plum Island, and heading to the beach was a yearly activity. As we all grew and we had our own families, the yearly gathering at Plum Island got bigger and better, and passing the pink house has always been the tell that you're just a few minutes away from the beach. I grew up hearing the same story you guys shared about it being a spite house and believed it to be true as it truly sits alone on the salt marsh.

54:24It's pretty weird looking. Just last month, though, being a new homeowner on the island, I was sent a town newsletter in which a tribute to the Pink House gave a different history. I've attached the article for you to read. While it wasn't quite built with spite, there seems to have been some spite in the story. Our family loves the show and even flew to Boston to take our two adult girls who live in Boston to see you live. Thanks to you, we are walking local experts on the Biosphere 2. And that is from Amy Sandy, who is wonderful. Yeah, thanks a lot, Amy. Amy, number one, thank you for coming to see our show.

54:59And number two, congratulations on your new house. Yeah, for sure. And number three, thank you for sending us a delightful email. And if you want to be like Amy, you can send us an email too to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thank you.

55:57Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.