Friday plans include a cold beverage? Meet the beer fridge of 1899.
It’s from a catalog of by L. H. Mace & Co. of New York, now in our @smithsonianlibraries. Early refrigerators used insulation (with an inch between two sets of walls) and circulation to move cool air from the ice chamber throughout the space.
Inside this refrigerator, there were places for kegs to rest and shelves in the lower part of the refrigerator could be removed, making it possible to chill two more kegs.
Apot-in-pot refrigerator,clay pot cooler is an evaporative coolingrefrigeration device which does not use electricity. It uses a porousouterearthenware pot, lined with wet sand, contains an inner pot (which can be glazed to prevent penetration by the liquid) within which the food is placed - the evaporation of the outer liquid draws heat from the inner pot. The device can be used to cool any substance. This simple technology requires only a flow of relatively dry air and a source of water.
The most elaborate versions of these used special cuts to channel air flow and allowed the ancient Persians to create frozen delicacies in the summers. Sharbat, anyone?
In the mid-19th century, across the Northeast of the United States, workers would cut ice from frozen ponds, haul it to port and ice houses, put it on a ship and send it around the world as part of the ice trade for refrigeration.
The ice was cleared off snow and debris then the surface was scored with horse driven ice plows to create a grid of squares. Giant handsaws and ice pikes were then used to break up the squares of ice.
