Keeping it Cool

Renee: Here's the thing that happened when I was maybe six years old. My mom sent me to grab something out of the refrigerator. I don't know. I don't want to say it was butter or something. You know what? She was probably making the worst food ever made in the history of mankind.

Marc: Don't doggone your mom.

Renee: City chicken. If you've ever had city chicken. Oh, I hate it. Anyway, I opened the door and I just stood there. And I stood there with the door open, the cold air spilling out, staring into it like it was going to tell me something. And my mom yelled from the other room. She's like, close that door. You're letting the cold out. And I'm like, oh, I remember thinking, okay, that's a weird thing to say. Where's it going?

Marc: Why is it escaping?

Renee: Is the cold alive? Where does it live when the door's closed? Does it just keep getting colder and colder? Okay. Yeah, it was a lot.

Marc: You were six, right? Yeah. Sort of a heavy philosophical moment for a six-year-old. It was.

Renee: I was asking real questions, and no one had an answer, Mark. My mom just yelled again, so I closed the door. But those questions state, where does it come from? How does the box know how to be cold? Who invented this thing? And why aren't we talking about it all the time?

Marc: I could just see or hear your mom yelling the second time. Like I could hear it the first time. It'd be sort of this polite, you know, hey, close the door. And then the second time, Renee, close the door.

Renee: Close the door. Hey.

Marc: Hey. Yeah, I could hear that. I could totally hear your mom doing that. So I think about the refrigerator kind of differently. And this like mental image is my dad's porch refrigerator. So, you know, every family has one. Maybe not on the porch, right? It's on the, you know, the utility room, the garage, you know, whatever, right? The one that was in the kitchen fridge, you know, the kitchen fridge like five years ago, it gets demoted, right? You know how, you know, it makes the clanking noise, you know? You know, because the compressor is loose. And instead of just tightening the compressor, then it just gets, you know, demoted.

Renee: Or it's the ice machine is just way too loud. Right, yeah. And you're just like, screw it.

Marc: Yeah. yeah and ours was this white and it was square edge totally boxy it was very plain just the fridge and the freezer no water dispenser no ice maker you know no nothing and it lived in the back porch because the kitchen fridge was for actual food and this one and it was just my dad and i so it's not like it was you know there was a lot there but, This one was for what, you know, for what mattered to me. Mountain Dew, Dr. Pepper, and foil-wrapped mystery meat burritos of, you know, sort of indeterminate provenance.

Renee: Okay, so yeah, everybody has one of those, right? So I have one in my garage, and it's just a plain freezer, fridge kind of thing, right? But I live in the desert, and, you know, we were saying today it's 106 today. And all summer long, the garage will get to be steady.

Marc: 120 or something yeah.

Renee: Like yeah like like hot like really hot and so the refrigerator you buy has to be like have special insulation otherwise everything burns out and like it it can't it won't get cold if it's too hot like it's a whole thing right i want to i just want it to be known that my cheapo refrigerator costs as much as my good one just because it's sitting in the garage and mine is for beer and um and the eggs that sam insists on buying bulk at costco

Marc: We don't put eggs well we do but people don't put eggs in the refrigerator here so yeah you would go out they'd be hard-boiled oh.

Renee: Fantastic so

Marc: Yeah like that that extra fridge particularly in the states i think that's a universal constant you know it's however many years out on the porch it's 90 plus in the summer and you know that refrigeration cycle was figured out in the 1800s, holding a thermodynamic, you know, whale wall between, you know, food and not food anymore every second of every day. And, you know, nobody ever thinks about the thing.

Renee: We take it so for granted. What are we thinking?

Marc: I know.

Renee: I would be dead without it.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: I'm dead without an ice maker.

Marc: Well, you and me both. You and me both. Okay. Living in England, that's like, like ice. What is that? Yeah.

Renee: Yeah, you're right. You're right. Like, I gave you a cold can of soda. Isn't that enough?

Marc: Okay.

Renee: I gave you a very cold can.

Marc: So last night, you know, we go out. Meredith and I. We go out. We go see a movie. It's a date, you know, thing. And I wanted ice in my, you know, cup. And the ice machine is always broken at this movie theater. It makes you really mad. So they have ice behind the counter. So you go and you ask for ice. And she gives me like one half of a little scoop, you know, and I look at it like, you know, it's, yeah, it's very sad. And so it's so sad. It is. It was so sad. And so we go over to the machine and start putting it in. And this other guy, he's, I hear him say, yeah, she gave me too much ice. And I'm like, I'll take some of yours. And he literally gave me some of his ice. Well, yeah.

Renee: Like I'm American. I need more.

Marc: I know. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways. All right. So, look, refrigerators, we absolutely take them for granted. And today, hopefully, we're going to fix that. We're going to dig into where refrigeration came from, how it actually works, who built it, who almost destroyed the planet with it, and why the humble refrigerator might be the single most important appliance in human history. We said that about the toilet last week. So, I mean.

Renee: I know. We say this a lot, and I still think it's a sewing machine because that's a strong claim. I'm willing that my mind changed, right? But, okay.

Marc: That's no double-entry bookkeeping. Right. But I guess double-entry bookkeeping isn't, you know, an appliance, I suppose. So anyways. All right. I'm prepared to defend the refrigerator, though.

Renee: He is. He's been ready since Tuesday. Everybody, welcome to the Nostalgic Nerds podcast. Alright, so before we can talk about the refrigerator, we have to talk about the world before it, because I think we generally cannot imagine what the world was like, and I want to try.

Marc: It's a good place to start, because refrigeration is one of those technologies where the before and after are so dramatic that you almost can't believe they actually connect.

Renee: So here's the scene. It's, I don't know, 1840? I love the 1800s. You're an average person somewhere in America or Europe. Your relationship with cold food is entirely dependent on the season and your geography. If you're near a frozen lake in the winter, great, you can harvest ice. If you're wealthy, you might actually have an ice house, which is basically a pit in the ground insulated with sawdust where you store blocks of ice cut from a lake during the winter. But if you're a regular person in July, in Philadelphia, you just eat warm things. You eat things that don't need to be cold. Or you eat things that haven't had time to go bad yet. So spoilage was literally a part of your life.

Marc: Yeah, completely. Meat spoilage, milk. Milk going bad. That's rough. Produce rotting. This was a massive, just all the time problem. Relentless. and it affected public health. It affected what people could eat. It dictated how far you could transport food before it became dangerous. And it was just accepted, like the weather.

Renee: Okay, so let's talk about ice because before mechanical refrigeration, ice was the whole thing. It was the solution people came up with, the first real refrigeration technology. And there's a guy you need to know about here, a man named Frederick Tudor. He's one of history's great unhinged visionaries, and there were many, but he's one of them. He became obsessed in the early 1800s with the idea that you could harvest natural ice in New England during the winter, ship it to warm places and sell it. And everyone, and I do mean everyone, thought this dude was insane.

Marc: I mean, just hearing it like I'm shaking my head, like, you know, shipping ice sounds completely mental. Yeah. Oh, it sounds completely insane.

Renee: People mocked him. Boston newspapers wrote...

Marc: I mocked him. I would feel like...

Renee: Actively mocking him right now. Boston newspapers wrote about him as a joke. His own family thought he'd lost his mind. He went into debt more than one time. He was literally thrown into debtor's prison, and none of that stopped him.

Marc: None of it. I like this guy already.

Renee: He just kept going, and eventually he figured out that if you insulated ice well enough, with sawdust mostly, you lost way less of it melting than you'd expect. He figured out how to get ice into places like Charleston and Havana and eventually Calcutta. He figured out how to create a demand for a product no one knew they needed. He became known as the Ice King. And by the middle 1800s, ice was a legitimate global industry.

Marc: That's nuts. I mean, The Ice King. It's like Homer, Mr. Plow. Yeah, the Plow King. Oh, and then Plow King, yeah. Barney was Plow King. The Ice King, that's a totally earned name there, I think.

Renee: He absolutely earned it. And here's the thing. At its peak, the American ice trade employed tens of thousands of people. There were ice harvesters, ice warehouses, ice delivery routes. There were ice boxes in homes, which were basically insulated wood boxes with a compartment for a block of ice on the top and your food on the bottom. You had to empty the drip pan when the ice melted. That was the whole system right there.

Marc: Yeah, an ice box is literally just a box with ice in it. That's the tech where it starts here.

Renee: And good marketing. I mean, it's an ice box.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: That tech, that's the tech, and it worked, and it worked well enough that the ice trade became a cornerstone of food distribution, but it did have massive limitations, kind of like AI. You were dependent on cold winters. You were dependent on transportation. If you lived somewhere that didn't have reliable ice delivery, you, my friend, were out of luck. And the whole thing was vulnerable to a warm winter, which happened. And it was a disaster. So somebody had to figure out how to make cold without waiting for winter to show up.

Marc: Okay. So because it's me and I'm, you know, like this weird stuff, like ice delivery still exists too. It's not like it's, you know, the way restaurants absolutely rely on ice delivery. literally there's a specialty ice place in new york to serve like all the upper east side you know saloons and stuff right because they have special ice you know there's no bubbles right.

Renee: And exactly fits in the bourbon

Marc: Glass yeah yeah yeah the whole thing the whole thing yeah anyways all right so so this is where the the story gets interesting though how do we make cold, So wait, before we go there.

Renee: I just want to say I did the math one time. I tried to figure, so I have a pool and people don't realize this. When you live in the desert and you have an in-ground pool, the pool gets hot.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: Right? Like that water gets to be like at the height of the heat of the, like when we're having 115 degree days for, you know, a whole month, that pool gets to be about, I don't know, 100 degrees. At which point we start using it like a bathtub because it's actually warmer than the tub water. So it gets really hot. And I sat down and figured out one time. Okay. If I wanted a chiller, the chiller, which means it runs across the pipes, it sucks it out of the pool, runs it across pipes that are frozen, and it spits out colder water. But the pool's so big that it only will change it by about two degrees, right? And I thought, what if I get tons of blocks of ice? okay so here's how much for me to get that thing back down to 80 degrees at the height of the summer i need 400 blocks of ice any idea what that might cost me about seven grand that summer and it wouldn't even stay that way right so yeah refrigeration yeah yeah i wish i had it i wish i had it my damn pool all right go ahead

Marc: All right. So here's the fundamental question that drove the invention of mechanical refrigeration. Can you make something cold without already having something cold?

Renee: Which sounds so simple when you say it that way.

Marc: Yeah, it sounds simple, but the answer requires understanding. We obey the second law of thermodynamics in this house. Yeah, but the answer requires understanding something that was not obvious at all until the right people started thinking about it carefully, which is how heat actually moves and what happens to gases under pressure.

Renee: All right, all right, all right. Walk me through this. How does the refrigerator actually make cold?

Marc: Okay, so here's the insight thing here. Cold isn't really a thing. Cold is the absence of heat, and heat moves. It always moves from hot things to cold things, never the other way on its own. So if you want something to be cold, you don't add cold to it. you remove heat from it. This is why your block of ice thing doesn't work very well.

Renee: So a fridge is actually a heat mover, not a cold maker.

Marc: That's right. Heat refrigerator, or a refrigerator is a heat pump. It takes heat from inside the box and moves it to the outside of the box. And it does that using something called the refrigeration cycle, which relies on the physical properties of certain fluids that evaporate and condense at useful temperatures.

Renee: I explain that.

Marc: Okay. So you've got this fluid, call it a refrigerant. When you let the fluid evaporate, it absorbs the heat from its surroundings. That's the cold part. When you compress it and make it condense back into liquid, it releases the heat somewhere else. That's how you move the heat from the inside to the outside. The compressor, the thing that hums and rattles when it's loose in your kitchen, is the pump that keeps the cycle going. So it compresses the refrigerant, which makes it condense and release heat through these coils, if you've ever seen the back of your refrigerator. I don't know if they still have the way that the backs of the refrigerators look today, but, yeah, if you pull it back, you know, all these coils and stuff.

Renee: Yeah, you'd see it would just be a bunch of panels.

Marc: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The coils on this back of the fridge. Then it lets the refrigerant expand and evaporate inside, which then absorbs heat from the food.

Renee: So the hum of the machine is moving heat out of your food.

Marc: Right. The hum is the sound of thermodynamics happening in your kitchen, Renee.

Renee: I will never hear the hum the same way. Again, that's genuinely kind of beautiful.

Marc: It is. And the principle behind this was understood, like, really early. A Scottish physicist named William Cullen demonstrated artificial refrigeration in the 1750s. 1750s, people. 50s.

Renee: Yeah.

Marc: By creating a small amount of ice in a lab using evaporation, like Doc Brown in Back to the Future 3. Right. Yeah, he has a big old machine and then he gets like one little like gross looking ice cube. Yeah. Yeah. He wasn't trying to build a fridge though, right? He was doing an experiment, but he showed that it actually was possible. And then somebody had to turn possible into practical. Right. I mean, this is the story of engineering, right? And then from the 1750s to, you know, very much later, that took a while. A man named Jacob Perkins, an American inventor working in London, patented the first practical vapor compression refrigeration machine in 1834. Still pretty darn early. It used ether. Boy. Ether, yeah. Oh, yay. as a refrigerant, and it worked, and basically nobody cared.

Renee: What? Okay, first of all, if it had a leak, you'd all be unconscious. Second, it's a classic inventor problem. I've got a solution to something that nobody wants.

Marc: Yeah, exactly. Totally classic. So the technology existed before the world was ready for it. But then over the next several decades, other inventors in Europe and America kept working on the problem. A man named John Gorey in Florida, a doctor built a refrigeration machine in the 1840s specifically to cool the rooms for yellow fever patients. I know. You know, they get, yeah, he was treating sick people and he thought cold air might help them. And he's right. He got a patent in 1851. He tried to commercialize it and couldn't get funding and died broke.

Renee: It keeps happening, right? Inventors keep dying broke. Not that Dyson guy, but everybody else. Everybody else dies broke.

Marc: Oh, the dude that had the jet engine, you know, he was, you know, it took him forever to get it. Right.

Renee: Yeah. All because he was only 23.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. And our friend that did vulcanized rubber.

Renee: Right. Him too.

Marc: The history of refrigeration is littered with brilliant people who were ahead of the market. But by the second half of the 1800s, industrial refrigeration was starting to take off. Breweries were the early adopters, you know, of course.

Renee: Yeah, because that's important.

Marc: Yeah, they needed consistent coal to ferment beer properly. And they had money and they invested in mechanical refrigeration a big way. Although, you know, I don't drink, but it seems to me that the beer in England is just as warm as everything else.

Renee: Well, they drink warm beer on purpose. Don't they drink like a hot Guinness in the winter?

Marc: Yeah, yeah.

Renee: Yeah, that's not right. Okay. At any rate, of course, beer cracked the code. Beer is always in the middle of – it's always there. It's in the middle of – of course.

Marc: Yeah, of course. Beer is always there. Like, you know, I wonder what the Egyptians did with, you know, how they managed their beer since they didn't have refrigeration.

Renee: It makes me think of Homer, right? With that, like, beer, duffs, the answer to and cause of all of life's problems.

Marc: Duff. Duff man. Okay, so beer and then meatpacking. Chicago's meatpacking industry was transformed by mechanical refrigeration. That's probably a good one. Refrigerated rail cars changed the whole geography of American food. You could slaughter cattle in the Midwest and send the meat to New York fresh. This was, you know, the revolution of food distribution. And it still works this way.

Renee: Yeah, so industrial refrigeration came way before home refrigeration.

Marc: Yeah, several decades, yeah. Home refrigeration didn't really start showing up until the 1910s, 1920s. And early ones were expensive, of course, complicated, and actually kind of terrifying.

Renee: Wait, wait, why? Like more terrifying than the crank on the front of a Model T

Marc: That took people's off.

Renee: And killed them? Like, why was it terrifying?

Marc: Maybe, maybe, yeah. Because refrigerants, they were using things like sulfur dioxide. Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh, yum. And methyl chloride and ammonia.

Renee: Oh, come on. Yeah.

Marc: I know, ammonia gas.

Renee: It's like tear gas. You're just making tear gas and sticking it in your kitchen.

Marc: Right. You know, these are toxic gases, right? So if your refrigerator leaked, which early ones sometimes did, you could be in serious trouble. There were accidents. There were deaths. and people knew this and it understandably made them nervous about having one in their kitchen.

Renee: So I guess you had a choice, right? Take your chances with a leaky poison box or just keep using the ice box.

Marc: I guess. I guess so. And a lot of people chose the ice box, right? Fair enough. Fair enough, right? The ice industry was still huge into the 1920s and then a few things happened, right? So companies like General Electric started producing We're going to have to talk about 30 Rock, aren't we? Right. Companies like General Electric started producing more reliable home refrigerators. The famous GE Monitor Top came out in 1927. It was called the Monitor Top because the motor sat on top of the unit and looked like a gun turret of the Civil War ironclad ship, The Monitor. Right. That's a very specific design inspiration right there. Yeah, it's not subtle, right? But it worked, and it was reliable. I've seen some of these. These are really cool. GE sold a huge number of them. And then in 1930, a chemist named Thomas Midgley Jr. introduced the world to Freon. Oh. Freon. And this is where the story takes kind of a sharp turn.

Renee: All right. I want to stop here because Thomas Midgley Jr., a person that I think deserves his own podcast, or at least his own Netflix documentary, right? His own cautionary tale inscribed on a monument somewhere. So, Mark, please tell people about what Tommy did.

Marc: Tom. So Thomas Midgley Jardineer is, and I say this full historical weight here, the single human being who has had the most negative environmental impact on the planet of any individual in history. So it's not hyperbole. This is an actual assessment of environmental historians. So big deal.

Renee: And yet, he was brilliant, celebrated, and considered a hero in his own time.

Marc: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So in his time, he was a celebrated industrial chemist. He worked for General Motors. And before we get to Freon, we have to mention what he did before Freon, because it puts everything in context. Okay, in the early 1920s, Midgley was trying to solve engine knock in cars. He discovered that adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline eliminated engine knock. And GM commercialized this as leaded gasoline.

Renee: Which we now know poisoned basically the entire planet.

Marc: Yeah. There is actually, I think, a documentary about tetraethyl lead. Leaded gasoline was used for decades, and it put lead into the air everywhere cars were driven, which was literally everywhere. And the atmosphere lead exposure has been linked to measurable declines, hello, in cognitive function for multiple generations of people worldwide. Yeah, it's a catastrophe that unfolded slowly over 50 years. And our friend Tommy, Tommy Midgley here, he did it.

Renee: And then, wait for it, he did it again. He did it again.

Marc: Again, yeah, and then he did it again. So the problem with the early refrigerants, the sulfur dioxide, methyl chloride, was that they were toxic and people were dying. That was, you know, it was real pressure to find something safer than that. Like, surprise. And Midgley was tasked with finding a better refrigerant. So he and his team at GM did the chemistry, and they landed on a family of compounds called chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs. Yeah, there you go. He trademarked one of them as Freon.

Renee: I want everybody listening to know I'm using air quotes, and it was, air quote, safe.

Marc: Safe. Yeah, I mean, it was incredibly safe at human scale. It was non-toxic, non-flammable, chemically stable. You could breathe it and be fine. Midgley famously demonstrated this by inhaling Freon and then blowing out a candle to show it was harmless. Yeah, harmless. It's like those dudes that would drink like DDT and stuff, you know? Right. Yeah. So it's true and safe, you know, at human scale.

Renee: He's like the ShamWow guy. He's like, watch me drink this. ShamWow! At human scale. At human scale. Yeah.

Marc: Okay, so the problem, which nobody knew at the time because nobody had thought about it, was what happens to this incredibly chemically stable compound when it drifts up and up and up into the upper atmosphere over decades? And the answer is, it destroys ozone. Freon and other CFCs, because they were so stable and didn't break down at low altitudes, just floated up and up and up until they reached the stratosphere, where ultraviolet radiation broke them apart and released chlorine atoms. And chlorine atoms are incredibly destructive to ozone. One chlorine atom could destroy roughly 100,000 ozone molecules.

Renee: So Tommy's the reason why I have crappy hair spray now. Like, it's him. He's the reason my curls fall out of my hair in 10 minutes. Yeah. God, if I could punch him in the face, I would.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: Okay, anyway, so we figured this out how. Yeah, okay. How we figured this out.

Marc: So two chemists, Sherman Rowland and Mario Molina, They published a paper in 1974 predicting that CFCs would deplete the ozone layer. They were told they were wrong because nobody believes climate science, right? They were told they were alarmist. The chemical industry, you know, DuPont and 3M and all these big chemical industries, you know, they spent enormous resources trying to discredit them. It's kind of like, I wonder, like, if they learned anything from that whole playbook of discrediting, you know, climate science.

Renee: Oh, you mean oil and gas?

Marc: I don't know.

Renee: Okay, go ahead.

Marc: And then the scientists discovered the ozone hole over Antarctica in 1985, and that it was basically the moment it became undeniable. I don't know.

Renee: I think they could have tried harder to discredit the scientists. It turns out it's easy to do. So the refrigerant that saved people from being poisoned in their kitchen was slowly burning a hole in the sky above Antarctica.

Marc: Right. Yeah, a hole that, if it had continued to expand, would have allowed enough ultraviolet radiation to reach Earth's surface to cause catastrophic increases in skin cancer, damage to crops, and destruction of marine ecosystems. Literally a genuine planetary-scale crisis.

Renee: But you know what? We actually did something about it.

Marc: That's right. We did do something about it, which is almost more remarkable when you think about global policy. So in 1987, the world signed the Montreal Protocol, which phased out the production of CFCs. It's considered one of the most successful international environmental agreements in history. The ozone layer is actually recovering. that is expected to return to pre-1980 levels sometime around this mid-century. It's a rare good news story and a rare environmental good news story.

Renee: So just to sum it up to where we are right now, so we invented a safe refrigerant. We used it everywhere. It accidentally started destroying the sky. We noticed, and then we, as being the apex predator on the planet, fixed it.

Marc: We fixed it. Yeah. I mean, you know, in broad strokes. Yeah, sure.

Renee: See, I want to go back to Tommy for a second because the story of his life has one more chapter, and it's wild.

Marc: Oh, you mean, you know, how he croaked?

Renee: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell him. Tell him. Tell him.

Marc: Okay. All right. So Thomas Misley Jr. later in life contracts polio. I know, sad. Like, strange that he contracted polio to, like, I don't know, a little strange. I didn't research, like, under what conditions and things, but, you know, you gotta wonder. And polio left him partially paralyzed. And being an inventor, he designed an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to help himself get out of bed. In 1944, ugh, I know, he becomes entangled in that system and was strangled by his own invention.

Renee: He was killed by his own ropes and pulleys. Oh, he's like the Segway CEO who died on a Segway. Remember?

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: He went over, he was on a path and went over the hill and boom,

Marc: Dead. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The man that introduced leaded gasoline to the world and introduced ozone-depleting refrigerants to the world was killed by a contraption he built in his own bedroom. Like, something was going to kill him, you know? Yeah.

Renee: Well, something kills all of us, but I don't want to be killed by my own ropes and pulleys.

Marc: Yeah, but, you know.

Renee: Honestly, I don't know what to do with that. I genuinely don't know what to do with that.

Marc: I don't know what to do. Yeah, it's just the thing. I mean, it's just, yeah, it's the way it is.

Renee: Okay, so after the Montreal Protocol, what happens to refrigerators?

Marc: Right, okay, so CFCs get phased out, and the industry transitions to HFCs, hydrofluorocarbons. Those don't destroy ozone, and they're chemically safer. You know, you would assume, yay, problem solved, right? Oh, there is a however coming.

Renee: Yes. HFCs are extremely potent greenhouse gases. They don't hurt the ozone layer, but they trap the heat in the atmosphere at a rate many hundreds of times more powerful than the carbon dioxide we started with. So we traded one atmosphere problem for a different atmospheric problem.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. And at some point, does someone just say maybe, I don't know, cold food is not worth it, right?

Renee: No, no one says that because cold food is enormously worth it. But it did mean that we had to go back to the drawing board again. The Kigali Amendment in 2016 set a path to phase down HFCs globally and move toward refrigerants with lower warming potential. Some modern refrigerants are actually returning to older options like propane or isobutane, which have been used in some European fridges for decades. So the wheel turns.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. We came all the way around to just, you know, hey, use flammable gases, but smaller amounts.

Renee: You know, it's smaller amounts, much better insulation, I guess better engineering. But yeah, isn't that how it always works? It's like it's just the same technology with a little bit of help and bam, we solved it. We're so like that. Human beings are so like that. All right, let's talk about the refrigerator actually did to human civilization because I think this gets undersold.

Marc: Yeah, OK. Big time undersold. I want to make the case that the refrigerator is the most important appliance in human history. I think you can't really call it toilet and appliance. So I think this one is going to be like, if we're going to pick appliance, then this is it. So this is better.

Renee: After you say this next sentence, I have a bone to pick, but go ahead.

Marc: All right. Okay. So more important than the washing machine.

Renee: I call it. No, no. Men in the 1800s weren't washing clothes. No. Go ahead. Keep going.

Marc: But if you wear it all, you know, denim, you know, you don't have to wash your denim. You just put it in the freezer.

Renee: You go.

Marc: More important than the microwave. More important than the television. Possibly the most important household object of the 20th century. All right.

Renee: Yeah, I might give you that. I might give you that. Yeah. All right. Make the case.

Marc: All right. So, food safety first. The foodborne illness was just a huge killer. Salmonella, E. coli, listeria. These things are part of daily life in a way that we just don't even imagine now. Refrigeration didn't eliminate foodborne illness, obviously, but dramatically reduces the risk of bacterial growth in meat and dairy and produce. Life expectancy gains in the 20th century are attributed to a bunch of things. Clean water, vaccines, antibiotics, sewage. But refrigeration is in that, you know, conversation as well.

Renee: And it changed what people ate.

Marc: Right. So before reliable refrigeration, what you ate was largely determined by where you lived and what season it was. You ate local food, you ate seasonal food, you ate preserved food, salted, pickled, smoked, dried. The preservation methods are fine. There's no issues with that. They have their place. They constrain your diet, though. Refrigeration meant that a person in Boston could eat fresh oranges from Florida in December, although you don't want to refrigerate your citrus. I'm just saying, people. It meant that you could buy ground beef and not have to use it in the next two hours.

Renee: It changed agriculture, too. The refrigerated supply chain, refrigerated trucks, refrigerated warehouses, refrigerated ships for international food trade. This is what allows the modern global food system to exist. Can I just tell you, where I sit today is the date capital of the world. anyway it's a thing right it allows the modern global food system to exist California grows foods defeats the whole countries countries trade food across oceans none of that works without the cold chain the refrigerator in your kitchen is the last link in a refrigerated chain that might stretch back to another continent yeah

Marc: Well you know like I live in England so So if I want berries in the wintertime, they're not being grown in England, you know?

Renee: No, they're being grown down the road or in the Central Valley of California.

Marc: Morocco. Actually, a lot of our stuff comes from Morocco. I love Morocco. Oh, nice. And yeah, Egypt, strawberries from Egypt.

Renee: Yeah, we all have the same climate though. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Marc: So the economics of food change on this as well, and it makes food cheaper.

Renee: Significantly cheaper because you could buy in bulk and store it, because you could reduce waste, because you could standardize the scale and scale food production in ways that were impossible when everything was perishable within hours. Refrigeration contributed to making a food a smaller percentage of household Income over the course of the 20th century.

Marc: You know, I hadn't thought about this when I was looking at the script and the research on this, but I wonder how refrigeration impacted restaurant growth as well. So anyways, side thing, I'll have to look at that later. Now, this, you know, this process that freed up money for other things, including, you know, presumably appliances you're buying to store more food.

Renee: It's a self-reinforcing cycle. And I want to talk about the cultural side of this because the refrigerator became this object that we have a relationship with. It's not just an appliance. It's where you put the drawings your kids made. Well, I don't have kids. I put the drawings your kids make on that refrigerator. Raider. It's where you leave your notes for your family or where Sam puts the schedule for the Pirates games. It has the things you stand in front of when you're stressed out and you don't even want food and you just want to look at it.

Marc: Yeah, the stress fridge visit. Completely universal behavior.

Renee: Yeah, completely universal. And the inside of someone's fridge tells you who they are as a person. And I firmly believe this. If you came to my house and open my fridge, you'd say, hoarder. Yeah, that would be me.

Marc: All right, so what does it say about you besides hoarder?

Renee: In my fridge, it says I'm an optimist who buys fresh vegetables with the best of intention and then eat cereal for dinner anyway or boxed macaroni. I eat more from the pantry than I ever eat from the fridge. And there's always a bunch of wilting cilantro. Oh, my God, it's in there right now. There's wilting cilantro in there right now because I didn't actually make the tortilla soup. So there you go. It's basically my signature.

Marc: Okay. Cilantro. You know, here we call it coriander, but I got to, you know. There you go. Okay. I love that stuff. But once you get it and you open the package, like it's done. It's done. Like you can't even refrigerate it because it just gets all like smooshy and weird. Yeah. It's strange. But my fridge says I've got, you know, we've got kids. There's, you know, okay. And it probably says more about how Meredith thinks about it than me. But, you know, there's a shelf dedicated to different types of things, right? this is the yogurt and dairy shelf this is you know this one oh I.

Renee: Need to come stay with you guys so I can wreck the shelves because I don't do that at all

Marc: Yeah the bottom like you know above the drawers those two shelves are like you know leftover shelves right you know so anyways yeah yeah, Oh, yeah.

Renee: It is a household battleground. Yeah, we do have a lot of fights. We have more fights about the freezer than the fridge because the freezer has limited space. Me and Sam, we argue about that.

Marc: Yeah. Well, you know, at our place, everybody lives at home right now except for one of the kids. And so, I mean, we got four kids. We got a lot of stuff. And because we're vegetarian, there's a lot of the vegetarian products that end up in the freezer. So it's always packed. You know, it's always packed. But oh, man, the air fryer. We might have to do a thing on the air fryer at some point because.

Renee: Oh, confection ovens. Yeah.

Marc: Yeah, we're loving the air fryer. Anyways, all right. You know, here's this whole evolution to talk about because the fridge didn't stop changing just because the basic concept got solved, though. There's actually kind of two evolutions running in parallel. So the features themselves, frost free. Okay, like we don't even think about frost in the freezer anymore.

Renee: You used to have to, like, rake that crap off. It would start to take up the whole freezer.

Marc: Yeah, exactly. Ice maker, water dispenser, things like touchscreen now, right? But then the other side here is the look. And the look is the one that I kind of find, you know, yeah.

Renee: All right, walk me through the look because you really do like this. Go ahead, go.

Marc: Okay. So refrigeration by decades have kind of a clear visual progression. The earliest home models, the 1920s to into the 40s, let's say, were tall white porcelain boxes with rounded corners, exposed chrome. And importantly, heavy mechanical latches on the doors. I love those.

Renee: I know. Those big handles.

Marc: Yeah. I love the click. Yeah. They look like something out of a 50s diner because that's basically what they are, right?

Renee: Yes.

Marc: Yes. Yeah, exactly. Okay. And then you get into what I call the Easter colors era. So it's just kind of like the mid to late 50s through the 70s. These are my favorite colors, right? Avocado green. Yes. Harvest gold.

Renee: That's the one we had.

Marc: Yeah. My mom had a yellow one. Yeah. So the specific pink, which was called Mamie pink, sometimes it was called other things, but Mamie was Eisenhower's wife. And so this is why you see the pink show up in the 50s, post-World War II. That specific pink that lived in, we had, my first apartment had a giant enamel gas range in the pink. It was gorgeous. I loved it. Wow. Yeah. Anyways, then after you have the Easter, what I call the Easter color era, then you go to swing back to the white, but boxy and squared off, you know, and it's kind of utilitarian. So it goes from this kind of, you know, status symbol in the kitchen, you know, not just an appliance, but, you know, a piece of industrial design, you know, and then it goes to this boxy, you know, thing, plain colors, you know, neutral colors, white, lots of white, boxy squared. That's like kind of all through the eighties and then early nineties, then the brushed metal era, which is kind of where we are now, you know, but now with the brushed metal, you're starting to get, you know, brushed metal with touchscreen or a glass window. You've got the glass window, right?

Renee: Yeah, we have one where, yeah, you can knock on the window and it turns the light on inside and you can see what's in there. And then you're like, oh, I see where it is. And then you open the door. But like I said before, though, it's not that you're touching it that's turning the light on and off. It's not that sophisticated. It's actually the sound. and so when you knock it hears the sound and it turns on the light but had a pug and she would love to bark in the kitchen because you had to pay attention to her molly and molly would bark and the light would turn on and off on and off on and off and be like you know what seriously stop it so i don't care if you bark but this is making me crazy

Marc: Well the glass is an interesting development right because okay so go back to your six-year-old you know scenario you're opening the fridge to see what's inside.

Renee: Yeah. But the glass solves that. Yeah, I don't have to do that.

Marc: The glass solves that. But glass is like, glass is not exactly a great cold, you know, insulator. So there's a lot of technology on how that glass actually works.

Renee: Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, there's a lot of decades held together by the same thing being at the center of every kitchen.

Marc: Yeah. So I have a real thing for the Easter colors. I just mentioned the gas, you know, the gas range. It was built like a tank. I love that thing. You know, but it looks ridiculous in kind of, you know, isolation, right? But the manufacturers of that period were trying to make appliances look like furniture instead of equipment. And they were proud of them. People showed them off. Yeah, you know what?

Renee: Now we hide the appliances behind cabinet panels. We pretend they aren't there. But there is this, I think they're called, the company's called Big Chill. They are bringing, yeah, they're bringing back the rounded corners, the big handles. Those things are crazy expensive. But you can get them in turquoise and pink and pastel yellow. And like, yeah, Big Chill still does it. And so it can be a showpiece again if you want. But you're right. I mean, I remember visiting people and like, and you'd see like counterculture. counter counter and then this giant thing that just looks like a big broom closet like is that the fridge like what do you want a big thing that looks like a like it i don't get it but

Marc: Yes yes yeah you know and for other than things like big chill for the most part nobody's painting appliances pink anymore.

Renee: No right they're all they well it probably saves them money in the long run right we can go back to those mechanical latches because i seriously it's like those have a story. Tell me. Tell me the big latch story. It's my favorite thing.

Marc: Yeah, it shouldn't be your favorite thing, though. All right. It's got kind of a dark history here. So the latch could only be open from the outside, which made a discarded refrigerator a death trap. Kids in junkyards and basements would climb inside, pull the door shut, and not be able to push it back open. And again, there were deaths. The refrigerator's got a lot of death in it.

Renee: It does. Actually, I remember that as a kid because they wouldn't let you get rid of your fridge if it still had the door on. Right. Like you literally had to take it off before the garbage people would come get it. Because, yeah, the kids would go play in landfills. I played in a cemetery the whole time growing up. So if you lived near a landfill, of course, you would go play there. Right. Anyway, it's exactly the kind of things that brings in the regulators. Right. In 1956, Congress passed the Refrigerator Safety Act. It required every fridge maker after October 1958 to use a magnetic door seal instead of the mechanical latch. The kind that closes on its own with a gasket and can be pushed open from the inside. The mechanical latch went away because heavy-handed regulation forced it out. Which is a good thing. I like regs.

Marc: I mean, I don't know if I just call it.

Renee: Big government got in the way of little refrigeration.

Marc: Yeah. I mean, oh, so many latch manufacturers went out of business, right?

Renee: It's probably one guy.

Marc: Yeah, exactly. One guy who.

Renee: Was living in, like, Andrew Carnegie's old house. Like, he's fine. He'll do fine.

Marc: Yeah. Yeah. It's, in my opinion, that's the right outcome. Although I love the look of the latch.

Renee: I know, I do.

Marc: And I just love it. Anyways.

Renee: So Big Chill, Big Chill still does it the right way. It's magnetic. It still holds it shut. But the latch is how you pull it open. Yeah.

Marc: Yeah, it's good. Look, again, that's the right outcome, you know, to get rid of the mechanical latches. you know but you know this is also like almost never how regulation actually goes.

Renee: Dude that was a hard turn for an appliance episode like that it went to death really quick right there huh

Marc: Well I mean that's we gotta keep it real right that's the way that's the way we roll.

Renee: Okay, walk me through the feature evolution then.

Marc: Okay, so some features, you know, kind of get weird here. The frost-free fridge in the 50s and 60s, which automatically defrosted the freezer, so you don't have to manually chip ice off of it every few months. Like, of course. And, I mean, like, we don't even think about it now, but it's a big deal. Genuine quality of life, right? The ice maker built into the door. Water dispenser. You know, sometimes the ice machines were inside, the early ones, not they didn't do through the door then through the door ice and water that was a big deal when it showed up you know here in the in the uk they they call that if you have the water and ice on the door they call that an american style fridge because in general i know i know you're like what yeah in general that's not how refrigerators are are like sold here you know and okay until we moved to the uk i didn't even know that there were these i knew that they were like college dorm sized refrigerators, right? But I didn't know that there were special, like, like, You know, not full-sized refrigerator refrigerators. There's literally half-sized refrigerators. And, yeah, weird shapes and sizes. Anyways. So, yeah.

Renee: Through the door ice machines. My grandparents had one. Yeah, my grandparents had one, and they talked about it like it was the moon landing. But you know what? Here in California, if you bought a craftsman's house, if you bought a craftsman, remember? Remember, like, that was a big thing. Like, people would buy their site because they wanted to restore them. And when you restored them, you weren't allowed to remodel. You had to restore. and your kitchen did not have room because it had an ice box right so the only thing you could put in that space was a half fridge because that's how big the ice box

Marc: Was yeah okay fair enough yeah yeah okay so so ice machines and some of these features and stuff is kind of a big deal you know because at the time these are like cutting edge features and then we kind of get into the modern era where you know someone decides that the refrigerator needed to be smart, And here, I'm sure, is where we both have some feelings about this.

Renee: Yeah, I have feelings about this. But you have feelings about smart fridges, too. So you start.

Marc: Go ahead. Yeah, okay. So, all right, smart fridges. And when I told my daughter about this, I was just in the car earlier tonight, and we were driving. And she's like, oh, what are you guys recording of refrigerators? And I said, we talked about the colors and everything. I told her about the Samsung Family Hub here. And she was like, her first words, that's stupid.

Renee: That's a good kid.

Marc: Yeah. So the Samsung Family Hub is a refrigerator with a 21-inch touchscreen on the door. It has cameras inside so you can look at what's in your fridge from the grocery store. It can play music. It has apps, has advertising. It runs on a version of Android.

Renee: Dude, it's a tablet glued to a fridge.

Marc: Yeah, it's a tablet glued to a fridge, and it costs roughly the same as a decent used car. I don't know.

Renee: I guess the camera thing, I guess, could be useful. How many times have you stood in the grocery store and you're like, do we have sour cream? We always have eggs because Sam buys them 82 at a time. But, like, do we have sour cream? Like, okay, like, you know what? Maybe. Maybe. But I need another app, and that app is probably tracking my look. Don't get me started. Go ahead. Just go ahead.

Marc: Yeah. I mean, eggs, you know. Okay, so this isn't really a problem so much because it's delivery now, right?

Renee: So yeah that's how i get all my groceries

Marc: Huh yeah i mean the smart fridge yeah okay sure.

Renee: No okay think about this though put an eugenic ai agent on it and have it say i know you're almost getting out of out of ketchup i'm gonna i'm gonna put it on your amazon list and when that list gets to 50 i'm gonna go ahead and send that out and you're gonna somebody's gonna knock on your door and you're gonna have your groceries maybe that would be helpful yeah but i don't know how helpful a camera i wonder if you could watch yourself open the fridge and stare at it and close it all day long just

Marc: Like stare into the stare into the emptiness that is your cold escaping yeah i i guess you know theoretically solves the egg problem or the butter problem or the ketchup problem or whatever but you know so does a five dollar dryer race board on the door yeah you know.

Renee: Or hello

Marc: Delivery you know so yeah, I don't know, that.

Renee: $5 dry erase

Marc: Board doesn't run.

Renee: Apps and track your location and give it to third parties.

Marc: Yeah, and do advertising, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. All right. But the $5 dry erase board doesn't need software updates, right?

Renee: Right, right, right. I guess that's valid, right? Okay. Yeah, that's fair.

Marc: Yeah. There's something sort of slightly concerning about the fact that my refrigerator might stop getting security patches. and like we've talked about this before in internet internet of things right the internet of things episode the refrigerator might have unpatched vulnerabilities my refrigerator is part of my home network if it gets compromised you know i don't know maybe it starts ordering things or you know what i've seen some of these iot use cases where they turn them into zombies right you know so maybe someone gets into my grocery camera, I think there's a real...

Renee: Dude, it turns off your freezer and ruins all your food. And sure, that's annoying. That's really annoying. Like, I always thought if international terrorists just did annoying stuff, we'd be way more scared. Like, why go after, like, one big thing when you can annoy 50 million people all at the same time? Yeah.

Marc: Yeah. I don't know. I don't want to invite more attack surface into my kitchen, I suppose.

Renee: There you go. Yeah. And yet the appliance industry has spoken, and the future is smart appliances. There's also fridge nails that can detect when you're running low on specific items, add them to your shopping list. Yay!

Marc: Yay!

Renee: Less cognitive stuff I have to do.

Marc: You can see where we feel on this, right? I guess, you know, it sounds amazing until you think about the supply chain of data that that requires. and the fridge has to know what's in it, you know, what requires cameras or sensors. The fridge has to know what you normally use, which requires, you know, to learn your habits. This is where it starts to get a little scary, right? And all that goes somewhere. It gets processed by someone, you know?

Renee: I'm just going to back up because I'm probably going to yell. And how long, Mark, before they start doing what BMW did and now I have this described in my damn fridge? Right? Right?

Marc: Okay.

Renee: Anyway, your fridge knows more about you than your therapist at this point.

Marc: Yeah. I mean, your fridge knows things about you that you don't, you know, know about yourself, I suppose.

Renee: Okay, but zoom out. Because the grand arc of refrigerator history, smart fridges are kind of a blip. The big legacy is the stuff you already said. It's food safety. It's extended shelf life. It's the cold chain. It's cheaper food. It's longer lives. I mean, in its arc,

Marc: It was good. Yeah. Yeah, it's only recently that refrigerators tried to get you to subscribe. I mean, like who wants to, like this is dystopia, right? I'm going off pace here a little bit, but this feels like dystopia. You've got the smart fridge and it knows all the stuff that you need. And then it starts to give you advertisements because it's sponsored, because it's a publisher subscriber advertising network. You know, it's an endpoint. It's an endpoint in a publisher-subscriber advertising, you know, system. Oh, my God. And it knows that you— Probably owned by Meta. Like, let's just go. Yeah. Right? And then, you know, probably because you have to use Facebook to log into the damn thing or something like that, right?

Renee: Or Google.

Marc: Yeah. You're like, oh, I need butter. And, you know, before you even get to open the thing, it has a little thing on the screen that says, Renee, you need butter. Would you like to add that to your cart? And it puts on the, I don't know, the Kerrygold, you know, Irish butter.

Renee: Right, right.

Marc: You know, which isn't the normal butter you use. You use the whatever butter.

Renee: Right, because I use Land O'Lakes because it's actually $3 cheaper than the Kerrygold, right? Like, of course, right? Of course, of course that's not what would work. Yeah. Because Kerrygold sponsored it. Like, that's exactly how it would work. Exactly.

Marc: Yeah. And it gives you a-

Renee: You'd have to do antitrust against a refrigerator.

Marc: You see, this is the kind of, like, this is what I don't want to see, you know? So I'm not buying no smart fridge in any, you know, anyways. All right. Oh, breathe. Okay. Okay. All right. The refrigerator is one of those technologies that sort of quietly and completely restructured the material conditions of human life. And because it works so well and so reliably and so invisibly, like, I don't want advertisement on my head. I want an invisible refrigerator. God. Yeah, okay. We just stopped thinking about it. Yes, I want to not think about it.

Renee: I don't want it thinking about me. I'm good.

Marc: Exactly. Yeah. It's like asking someone to appreciate running water. Of course you have cold food. You always have, you've always had cold foods, except, you know, we absolutely haven't had, you know, cold food forever.

Renee: Well, yeah. For most of human history, keeping food cold was either seasonal luck or a serious logistical operation.

Marc: Yeah. Now we have a humming box that does it automatically forever while we sleep. using a thermodynamic cycle that some of the greatest scientific minds of the 19th century and 20th century spent their careers figuring out.

Renee: And some of those people died broke and unknown.

Marc: Yeah, some of those people, yeah, definitely died broke and unknown.

Renee: Frederick Tudor, John Gorey, I see you, I see you, right? The refrigerator is for you. I appreciate you. There you go. There, yeah.

Marc: All right. They earned it. That's for sure.

Renee: So what do you actually take away from this one, like personally?

Marc: I think, you know, coming back, it's just the scale, right? The refrigerator is this tech where each individual unit is just a humble kitchen appliance. It just sits there and it hums and you don't think about it, but multiply that by hundreds of millions of households, entire refrigerated supply chains, spanning continents, you know, all that logistics. Yeah. You know, by the public health impacts accumulated over a century, it becomes this enormous invisible force shaping how civilization is organized. And I think there are a lot of technologies like that. Things that we don't notice precisely because they just work, right? We talk about that all the time, invisible technology. Uh-huh. Right? And the kind of thing, you know, that really moving, you know, the most successful technology is the stuff that disappears. Right?

Renee: I just have to tell everybody when we would all go out, me, you, Beth, the kids, Sam, like we all go out and we could do something. Beth would always ask in the car on the way home, what was your favorite part? Like everybody would say what they liked the most. And like, this feels like that. I like how we close them. That's a good one. That's a real good one. Right. So, yeah.

Marc: What's your favorite? What's your favorite part, Renee?

Renee: Right. I keep thinking about my six-year-old self standing with the refrigerator open asking where the cold goes. And I think what I was really asking was who thought of this, right? Who cared enough about this problem to spend their whole career on it? And the answer is a lot of people over a really long time, many of whom never got credit and never made money and never saw the world they built. And I think about that a lot when I look at technology. And I used to take that for granted. Someone cared. Someone probably broke and probably frustrated. People told them they were crazy. They sat down and cared enough to solve this. And I'm standing in my kitchen at midnight eating cold leftover pizza because of them. And I don't know. That feels worth acknowledging.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: Yeah.

Marc: Can you imagine not having cold pizza? No.

Renee: And so there was a kid at one of the colleges here. He just walks. He shares an apartment with a bunch of other guys, right? And they're guys. No offense to you, but like they're not. Like the pizza had been sitting on the counter for six days. and he thought it looks good and he ate it and he died he died from food poisoning like died he ended up with sepsis like yeah yeah it feels yes yeah i am glad i can eat cold pizza yeah

Marc: No that's a good thing that's a good thing all right good.

Renee: To the cold chain nerds past present and future

Marc: Yeah, there you go. To the cold chain nerds. Like, here, here's our drink. Here's my Kool-Aid.

Renee: Oh, my Kool-Aid was icing it. Here's to you.

Marc: That's right.

Renee: That's our episode. Thanks for spending time with us. If you learn something, tell a friend. If you want to argue about Smart Fridges, Mark's available on the internet. So there you go. Don't be wrong at him.

Marc: I don't think I'm wrong on Smart Fridges.

Renee: Man. Address your emails to Mark Mazzer.

Marc: Yeah. Speaking of email, nostalgicnervouspodcast.gmail.com. But I stand behind every word I said about the family hub. Like, I don't need all that stuff in a fridge. No, no, thank you.

Renee: No, no. Yeah, he does. He absolutely does. You can find us everywhere you get your podcast, rate us, review us, send something in the comments. It helps the algorithm. Hey, I've learned on YouTube. You say that at the end of everything. You're like, you know, subscribe, subscribe, like, share, like, like definitely it helps the algorithm and it definitely helps people find the show. So thanks.

Marc: Yeah. And if you've got a topic you want us to cover, okay, so it's very special. Australia overtook the UK as our number two country. No, what? Hey, Australia. Which is like, what? Yeah. What?

Renee: Hey, Australia, if there's something you wanted to hear. Exactly. We were actually talking about this a couple weeks ago. Like, what can we find that started in Australia? So let's just ask the Australians. Hey, if you guys had a technology that started with you, send an email to, what's the address?

Marc: Nostalgicnerdspodcast at gmail.com.

Renee: Send us an email tell us what it is we'll go research it and we would love to do that episode so definitely do that alright so I'm Renee and I'm Mark and this has been the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast now go close your refrigerator door you're letting the cold out alright

Marc: Wherever it goes.

Renee: Wherever it goes I don't know