Who Invented The Fridge/Refrigerator?

William Cullen of the University of Glasgow demonstrated for the first time in recorded history 1748 how ‘artificial refrigeration’ could be done. But it a German engineer, Carl von Linden, who holds the first patent for a refrigerator. He developed his machine in 1876.

William Culler didn’t use the invention for any practical purpose. An American inventor, Oliver Evans, designed a similar machine but even it didn’t catch on immediately with the public. It was left to Jacob Perkins to show the practicality of the machine. He also made some changes in the original design. He used ‘ether’ in the vapor compression cycle in 1834.

The first commercial success came when the ‘absorption refrigerator’ was developed. This was designed by Baltzar von Platen and Carl Munters of the Royal Institute of Technology in 1922. However, it differed in functioning from our current refrigerators.

The first commercially successful refrigerator, which functioned very much the same way as our current refrigerators, was launched in 1927 and a total of 1,000,000 were sold. It was named ‘Monitor’ and the company was ‘General Electric’. The early refrigerators used gases with were either harmful to the humans or to the atmosphere. The current refrigerators have very much tackled that problem.

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