Over the last 150 years or so, refrigeration s great strides offered us ways to preserve and cool food, other substances and ourselves. Refrigeration brought distant production centers and the North American population together. It tore down the barriers of climates and seasons. And while it helped to rev up industrial processes, it became an industry itself. To look at refrigeration s impact on consumers and industry, let us distinguish the refrigeration process from the refrigerator appliance.
Refrigeration is the process of cooling a space or substance below environmental temperature.
To accomplish this, the process at first removed heat through evaporation and then later in the 1850s with vapor compression that used air and subsequently ammonia as a coolant. Refrigeration has been around since antiquity. Though its inventor, Maryland farmer Thomas Moore, first introduced the term refrigerator in 1803, the appliance we know today first appeared in the 20th century. Early Refrigeration Ice was harvested and stored in China before the first millennium. Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans placed large amounts of snow into storage pits and covered this cooling agent with insulating material.