IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2017 - 16

in the 1860s, the development of
the cold-storage industry and its
interactions with the pure-food wing
of the Progressive movement of the
early 1900s, and the early attempts
by domestic refrigerator manufac-
turers to displace the old-fashioned
kitchen icebox that needed replen-
ishing every few days by the iceman,
with a machine that you just plugged
in the wall and forgot about. Rees's
chapter on the early days of electric
household refrigeration is especial-
ly good, with lots of details culled
from old catalogs, manufacturer's
records, and trade journals about
the less-than-stellar reliability of the
first machines. The rapidly grow-
ing electric-utility industry of the
1920s was eager to have their cus-
tomers buy refrigerators, because
the 24-hour load that refrigerators
represent would nicely balance the
expensive peak loads of lighting and
cooking that the power companies
struggled to meet. So power compa-
nies were among the loudest early
proponents of electric refrigerators.
However, it wasn't until automotive
companies such as General Motors,
which took over Frigidaire in 1921,
applied the same mass-production
and quality-control methods they
had learned from vehicle production
lines that domestic electric refrig-
erators started on the long road to
becoming the reliable and nearly
universal appliances we know today.
Rees is just as good when he
treats parts of the food-refrigera-
tion industry that are out of the
public eye: the extension of cold
chains to new agricultural markets
which could now sell their goods
over much wider stretches of both
space - due to refrigerated transpor-
tation - and time - due to the abil-
ity to store produce in cold-storage
warehouses. The far mers liked
having bigger markets, and the con-
sumers liked being able to buy straw-
berries in January, but not until the

16

cold-storage industry overcame a
bad reputation earned before opera-
tors learned how to keep different
foods at appropriate storage temper-
atures. Harvey W. Wiley, one of the
instigators of the Pure Food and Drug
Act of 1906, went on the record as
saying that "butter, milk, cream, eggs,
poultry and fish" should all be eaten
fresh instead of being kept in cold
storage - but unfortunately, that
list encompassed most of the foods
that cold-storage operators made
a living on. Eventually, industry lead-
ers such as Clarence Birdseye per-
fected quick-freeze technologies,
and food shortages during World
War II led consumers to try frozen and
cold-storage foods again, with better
results than before.
Though the main focus of Rees's
book is the U.S., he makes some
interesting comparisons between the
food-refrigeration practices of Ameri-
cans versus those of other countries.
It was Frederic Tudor who encour-
aged his ice salesmen in warm cli-
mates to concentrate on bars and
restaurants. Iced drinks, it appears,
are habit-forming, and our American
preference for ice water, iced tea, and
iced coffee distinguishes us from
Europeans to this day.
It's not just my impression that
refrigeration has never made as
much of an inroad in Europe as it
has in the U.S. Rees presents a
helpful table showing the average
interior volume of household refrig-
erators by country in 1998. North
America tops the list at 17 cubic
feet, with Australia in the middle
(11 cubic feet) followed by Japan,
Western Europe, and Russia, at
a measly 8 cubic feet. The reasons
for these differences are manifold:
shopping habits, differences in living
space, attitudes toward electricity
consumption, and more. But the fact
remains that North Americans are
the most refrigerator-happy people
on earth.
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

Rees structures his book in a
rather unusual way. Instead of pur-
suing a straight chronology, he
focuses on a single aspect of his
overall theme in each chapter, and
then pursues timelines as needed
within the chapter's subject to out-
line important events and trends.
In the hands of a less skillful writer,
this approach could lead to chaotic
incoherence, but Rees always keeps
his eye on the historical ball, and the
reader never feels lost among the
details, both good and bad.
Lest you get the impression that
Rees is just a shill for the food-re-
frigeration industry, I should note
that he is attentive to various down-
sides and even disasters that can be
attributed in full or in part to refrig-
eration. One of the more dramatic
scenes he presents is the tragic fire
in the ice-making and cold-stor-
age facility erected for the World's
Columbian Exposition in Chicago in
1893. A hastily-constructed wooden
framework for the steel boiler stack
caught fire one day, as it had several
times before. Only this time, once
the firemen had placed their lad-
ders on the stack and were climb-
ing up to fight the fire they could
see, it spread to the ice machinery
below, where hundreds of pounds
of compressed ammonia refrigerant
gas suddenly got loose. Many pro-
ponents of ice-making machinery
at the time claimed that ammonia
would not explode. Events proved
otherwise when the Exposition plant
blew up, killing seventeen people
and horrifying the thousands of fair-
goers who watched the whole thing.
Although smaller in scale, the
early years of domestic refrigera-
tion were attended by tragedy as
well. One of the early refrigerants
used in household machines was
methyl chloride, a chemical whose
slightly sweet odor is noticeable
only at toxic levels. Before nontoxic
refrigerants such as CFCs became
∕

DECEMBER 2017



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