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chapter 7 The Early Days of Electric Household Refrigeration “How do you do, Mrs. Prospect?” So began a 1923 “demonstration” book for Frigidaire salesmen designed to help them sell electric household refrigerators door-to-door. Assuming the salesman gained admittance to the home, his script told him to immediately approach the family’s existing icebox with a thermometer . “Mrs. Prospect,” went the pitch, “we find that the average ice box maintains a temperature of about 55 degrees, and I think you will agree with me that this will keep food properly for only a short time.” After measuring the temperature inside the prospect’s icebox and showing her the reading, the salesman then said, “The temperature in your refrigerator is ——— degrees. This is slightly warmer than I expected. If you had Frigidaire, the temperature would certainly be ——— degrees colder than you now have in your icebox. . . . Won’t you please talk this matter over with your husband tonight as, in all probability, I or one of our men will call upon him tomorrow afternoon and tell him the benefits of owning a Frigidaire.”1 To earn the right to give this spiel, a Frigidaire salesman had to memorize it; then he had to learn how to take the current products apart and put them back together again. Then he would go out on the road for two trips, of three weeks each, with an experienced salesman.2 Salesmen needed this kind of knowledge of the refrigerator and its differences with iceboxes in order to promote the sale of a product that still had a reputation for unreliability when these instructions were written in 1923. Despite the obvious advantages of electric household refrigerators, their high cost at that time made them a major investment for even the wealthiest of consumers . Worse still, refrigerator owners went without ice if the appliance failed for any reason. Another refrigerator company, Kelvinator, tried to assuage fears about the reliability of its products by linking its household refrigerators to the history of mechanical refrigeration. As a 1922 pamphlet explained, “Every cold storage plant, every packing house, every artificial ice company, and most of the large butcher-shops, hotels, restaurants and hospitals, have been using mechanical refrigeration for anywhere from twenty to eighty years.” It argued that “the The Early Days of Electric Household Refrigeration 141 basic idea behind Kelvinator is not new. It is no experiment. It is no novel idea, which may or may not be practical. It is a time-tried, and time-tested principle in which hundreds of millions of dollars are invested right now and without which our complicated social structure could not exist.”3 By reminding electric household refrigeration customers of the technology already operating in the cold chain, Kelvinator hoped to induce consumers to bring the most modern example of that chain into their kitchens. To shrink refrigerating equipment down to a size that could fit in a crowded kitchen, engineers (many of whom had no previous experience with refrigeration ) had to reconceive the entire apparatus in order to make household refrigeration both reliable and safe. Unwilling or unable to think so far outside of accepted technological norms, the earlier manufacturers of large-scale, multiton refrigeration units never entered the household market despite the obvious potential for such machines. Since they only custom-built large machines for individual customers, they could not shrink the existing technology to fit the home kitchen, and they proved unwilling to retool their production processes to meet the substantial demands of mass production. Besides changing the production process, entering the home refrigeration market would have required a distribution and marketing system to sell appliances to the consumer market rather than just sell to other firms. Some reconceptions of refrigeration units to household size worked better than others. Between 1924 and 1934, the physicists Leo Szilard and the even more famous Albert Einstein applied for twenty-nine German patents, most of which dealt with home refrigeration. Electromagnetism powered their system by drawing a metallicized refrigerant around a system that had no moving parts. Because of noise, their system never left the prototype stage.4 Other new entrants into the refrigeration industry with new ways of thinking had to go through another long period of trial and error before this new appliance became commercially viable. Along the way, every manufacturer of household refrigerators had many development costs. Despite their reliance on the same refrigeration cycle that had made industrial-size machines possible, household refrigerator manufacturers essentially started...

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