The history
2,400 years from Persian ice houses and shipped pond ice to the humming box in your kitchen, and the race to make it kind to the planet.
For most of history the only cold you could keep was winter ice, stored in thick-walled pits or shipped across oceans. Then scientists found that a liquid boiling at low pressure soaks up heat, and engineers learned to squeeze the vapour back into a liquid and loop it round and round. That loop moved from breweries and meat ships into kitchens, but its gases harmed the ozone layer and its motors ate electricity. Today's fridges use gentler gases and a quarter of the power, and hundreds of millions of homes, many of them in India, are still waiting for their first one.
c. 400 BCE
Ice houses for summer ice
Persian yakhchāls, Iran
1748–1756
Documented demonstration of artificial cooling
William Cullen, Scotland
1805
Design for a vapour-compression fridge
Oliver Evans, USA
1834
Vapour-compression refrigeration machine patented
Jacob Perkins, England
1858–1860
Ammonia absorption machine
Ferdinand Carré, France
1913
Electric home refrigerator
Fred W. Wolf Jr. (DOMELRE), USA
1958
Refrigerator made by an Indian company
Godrej & Boyce, India
1992–1993
Hydrocarbon (Greenfreeze) fridge
Greenpeace and Foron, Germany
400 BCE – 1914
No machines that make cold. People store winter ice in thick-walled houses and ship frozen pond ice around the world.
400 BCE
c. 400 BCE
Records suggest that Persians were building yakhchāls, domed ice houses, by about 400 BCE. Their walls were at least two metres thick at the base, made of a mortar called sarooj that resists heat. Ice frozen in shallow pools on cold desert nights was stored inside, packed with straw, through the scorching summer.
Why it mattered. Thick walls that slow down heat are still the first job of every fridge.
1833
1806–1833
Tudor began shipping ice cut from New England ponds to the Caribbean in 1806, and people laughed at the idea. In 1833 the ship Tuscany carried about 180 tons of ice to Calcutta, and around 100 tons survived the long voyage and sold at a profit. Calcutta built a stone ice house to store more.
Why it mattered. Cold became something you could buy, and the world grew hungry for a way to make it anywhere.
1914
By 1914 American ice plants made about 26 million tons of ice a year, more than the roughly 24 million tons cut from frozen lakes and rivers. At its peak, around 1880 to 1900, the natural ice trade had employed about 90,000 people and 25,000 horses.
Why it mattered. Machines had beaten winter, and the next step was to put the machine in every kitchen.
1748 – 1900
Scientists find that evaporating liquids steal heat, and engineers build machines that loop a refrigerant round and round to cool breweries, ice plants and meat ships.
1756
1748–1756 (sources differ)
Cullen, a doctor and chemist, used an air pump to lower the pressure over a dish of ether. The ether boiled at room temperature and pulled so much heat from the water around it that the water froze. He did the experiments in Glasgow, and they were published in Edinburgh in 1756, the first documented demonstration of artificial refrigeration.
Why it mattered. It showed that a liquid boiling at low pressure soaks up heat: the trick inside every fridge's cold coils.
1805
In a book about steam engines, the American inventor Evans described a closed machine that would boil ether in a vacuum to make ice, then squeeze the vapour back into a liquid to use again. He named all the main parts, but he never built it.
Why it mattered. It was the first detailed design for the cycle that modern fridges run on.
1834
Perkins, an American inventor living in London, patented a closed machine that evaporated a liquid to make cold, then pumped the vapour back into a liquid to use again with no waste. His prototype worked, but it never sold.
Why it mattered. Evaporate, compress, condense, repeat: this closed loop is the cycle inside almost every fridge today.
1856
1854–1857
Harrison, a Scottish-born printer and newspaper owner, reportedly noticed that ether used to clean metal type made the metal cold. He built machines that compressed ether vapour and turned it back into a liquid, first to make ice and then to cool a brewery in Bendigo. He patented his process in Britain in 1856 and his apparatus in 1857.
Why it mattered. He is widely credited with the first practical vapour-compression machine, doing real work in industry.
1859
1858–1860
Carré built a machine that used heat, not a pump, to push ammonia around a loop: water soaks up ammonia gas, and heating the water drives the gas out again under pressure. It was patented in France in 1859 and in the US in 1860. During the American Civil War one of his machines was smuggled through the Union blockade to make ice in Texas.
Why it mattered. It showed that heat alone can power a fridge, an idea still used where there is no steady electricity.
1876
1873–1879
Linde, an engineering professor, built his first refrigeration machine for the Spaten brewery in Munich in 1873. By 1876 he had a reliable, efficient machine that compressed ammonia, and in 1879 he founded a company to sell his ice machines.
Why it mattered. Brewers, meat packers and ice plants could now make cold dependably, on demand.
1882
15 February 1882
The sailing ship Dunedin left New Zealand with nearly 5,000 frozen sheep and lamb carcasses, kept cold by a steam-driven Bell-Coleman refrigeration machine. It reached London 98 days later and the meat sold at Smithfield market. Within five years, 172 more shipments followed.
Why it mattered. It launched New Zealand's frozen meat trade and proved food could stay frozen across the planet.
1913 – 1960
Electric fridges replace the icebox, sealed compressors make them reliable, new ‘safe’ gases make them common, and frost-free models end the chore of defrosting.
1913
1913–1914
Wolf's DOMELRE, short for DOMestic ELectric REfrigerator, sat on top of an ordinary icebox and replaced the block of ice with an electric cooling unit. It cost $900, about a year's pay, and several hundred were sold.
Why it mattered. For the first time, a home could make its own cold with no iceman calling.
1914
24 March 1914
Parpart, who also patented street-cleaning machines, was granted US patent 1,090,925 for a ‘refrigerator attachment’. Popular accounts often call it an early electric fridge, but the patent itself describes coils that carry cold water from the melting ice around the shelves. Her husband's name is on the patent too, common for women inventors then.
Why it mattered. Women were inventing in this field too, even when a man's name sat beside theirs.
1918
1916–1919
In 1916 Alfred Mellowes' Guardian Frigerator Company began building home fridges in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It was bought by William Durant, head of General Motors, renamed Frigidaire, and taken over by GM in 1919. In 1918 Kelvinator sold what is described as the first home fridge with an automatic control, and by 1923 it had about 80% of the US market.
Why it mattered. Big companies started making fridges like cars, in large numbers, for ordinary families.
1923
1907–1923
Pennington, a chemist, became chief of a US government food research laboratory in 1907. She helped design refrigerated railway cars so milk, eggs and poultry stayed fresh on long journeys. In 1923 she founded the Household Refrigeration Bureau to teach families how to keep food safely cold at home.
Why it mattered. Fridges exist to keep food safe, and she turned the science of cold storage into everyday habits.
1927
General Electric's Monitor-Top had its compressor sealed in a round steel case on top, designed by chief engineer Christian Steenstrup, who had come to the US from Denmark. It was named after the gun turret of the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor. It first sold for about $525, prices soon fell toward $200, and over a million were made.
Why it mattered. A sealed, reliable machine turned the fridge into an ordinary household appliance.
1930
1926–1930
Reports of a Berlin family killed by toxic gas leaking from a fridge's seal led the two physicists to design an absorption fridge with no moving parts. They applied for a US patent in December 1927, and patent 1,781,541 was granted on 11 November 1930. Electrolux bought some of their patents, but the fridge was never sold.
Why it mattered. Leaky, poisonous refrigerants were a real danger, and even the world's most famous scientist tried to fix it.
1930
1928–1930
Early fridges used gases like sulfur dioxide, methyl formate and ammonia, which are toxic, and leaks killed people. A General Motors team made dichlorodifluoromethane, the first CFC, sold as Freon. In 1930 Midgley breathed some in and blew out a candle to show it was neither poisonous nor flammable.
Why it mattered. Safe refrigerants let fridges into every home, but no one yet knew what they would do to the sky.
1952
1950s
Water vapour in the air freezes onto cold coils as frost, which blocks the cooling and once meant switching the fridge off to chip it away. In the 1950s American makers began selling fridges that defrost themselves: a fan blows air past hidden coils, and a timer switches on a small heater every few hours to melt the frost. Frigidaire, for example, introduced auto-defrost in 1952 and a frost-free model in 1958.
Why it mattered. No more chipping ice, though the heater and fan cost some extra electricity.
1958 – today
Fridges are made in India, star labels guide buyers, and the race is on to bring efficient cooling to the many homes that still have none.
1958
In 1958 Godrej & Boyce became the first Indian company to make refrigerators, working with General Electric. Before that, the few fridges in India were imported and costly.
Why it mattered. Making fridges at home in India was the first step toward one in every Indian kitchen.
2010
2006–2010
In May 2006 India's Bureau of Energy Efficiency launched a star label for appliances, from one star to five, and fridge makers could use it if they chose. From 7 January 2010 the label became compulsory for frost-free fridges. It shows how much electricity the fridge uses in a year, and more stars mean less power.
Why it mattered. Shoppers could finally compare running costs, and makers competed to earn more stars.
2010
2009–2010
Godrej designed the ChotuKool with village women: a small, top-opening cool box for rural homes. It uses a solid-state cooling chip and a fan instead of a compressor, so it can run on a battery, and was planned to sell for about Rs 3,250 (US$69).
Why it mattered. Cooling that suits homes with little money and unreliable power matters as much as a fancy fridge.
2021
2019–2021
India's National Family Health Survey for 2019–21 found that 37.9% of households owned a fridge: 63.4% in towns and cities but only 25.2% in villages. In 1998–99 the figure had been about 11%.
Why it mattered. Hundreds of millions of families still keep food without a fridge, so how efficient the next ones are really matters.
2026
1 January 2026
Under a rule notified in October 2024, India's star bands for fridges tightened by one star on 1 January 2026. A frost-free fridge that earned 5 stars in 2025 now has to use about 12% less electricity to keep them. For a 250-litre frost-free fridge, 5 stars now means under about 163 kWh a year, while a 1-star model uses about 245 to 282 kWh.
Why it mattered. The bar keeps rising, so a fridge's stars only make sense next to the year on its label.
By the numbers
National Family Health Surveys show fridge ownership in India more than tripling in two decades, but most homes still have none.
1973 – 2014
After the 1970s energy crisis, efficiency rules and better insulation and compressors cut a fridge's electricity use by more than three quarters.
1976
Between 1947 and 1974, the average American fridge went from using under 400 kWh of electricity a year to over 1,800 kWh. After the 1970s energy crisis, California set the first ever efficiency standards for fridges in 1976. Other states followed, and a national law was signed in 1987.
Why it mattered. Rules that capped energy use pushed makers to add better foam insulation and better compressors.
2014
15 September 2014
By 2009 a new American fridge used about 450 kWh a year, half as much as in 1990, says the US Energy Information Administration. New national standards in September 2014 cut the energy use of most fridges and freezers by another 20 to 25%. Since the 1970s, energy use has fallen by more than three quarters while fridges have grown bigger.
Why it mattered. Steady rules and better engineering made the fridge one of the great energy-saving stories.
By the numbers
Energy use climbed until the 1970s, then efficiency rules brought it down by more than three quarters, even as fridges grew bigger.
1974 – 2016
Scientists discover that fridge gases destroy the ozone layer and warm the planet. The world agrees, step by step, to replace them.
1974
28 June 1974
Molina, a young Mexican chemist, and Rowland worked out that CFCs from fridges and spray cans drift up to the stratosphere, where sunlight breaks them apart. The chlorine they release destroys ozone, the gas that shields life from ultraviolet light. They shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Paul Crutzen.
Why it mattered. It revealed that the gas inside a kitchen fridge could harm the whole planet.
1987
16 September 1987
Countries agreed to phase out the chemicals that destroy ozone, starting with CFCs. It became the first treaty ratified by every UN member state. Fridges switched from CFC-12 to HFC-134a, which does not harm ozone but traps heat, and later to gases such as isobutane.
Why it mattered. It is widely seen as the most successful environmental treaty ever, and the ozone layer is slowly healing.
1993
1992–1993
In 1992 Greenpeace brought together scientists and Foron, a struggling fridge maker in the former East Germany, to build a fridge that used hydrocarbons such as isobutane for both its cooling gas and its insulation foam. About 70,000 people pre-ordered one, the first came off the line on 15 March 1993, and within a year most European makers had followed.
Why it mattered. Hydrocarbon fridges, free of ozone-harming and high-warming gases, now number around a billion, says Greenpeace.
2016
15 October 2016
Meeting in Rwanda, nearly 200 countries agreed to cut back HFCs, the ozone-safe refrigerants in many fridges that are powerful greenhouse gases. Doing so could avoid up to about 0.5 °C of warming by 2100.
Why it mattered. The ozone treaty became a climate treaty too.
Did you know?
In 1833 about 180 tons of New England pond ice sailed to Calcutta, and around 100 tons were still frozen when it arrived.
The first electric home fridge, the DOMELRE, cost $900 in 1913, about a year's wages.
GE's Monitor-Top fridge was named after the gun turret of a Civil War warship, because of the round compressor on its top.
Albert Einstein co-invented a fridge with no moving parts, but it was never sold.
On 1 January 2026, many Indian fridges lost a star overnight without changing at all, because the star bands moved.
The people
1710 – 1790 · Doctor and chemist · Scotland
Froze water by boiling ether under a vacuum, the first documented artificial refrigeration.
1783 – 1864 · Merchant · USA
The ‘Ice King’ who shipped New England pond ice to the Caribbean and India.
1766 – 1849 · Inventor · USA and England
Patented the first vapour-compression refrigeration machine.
1816 – 1893 · Printer, journalist and inventor · Scotland and Australia
Built ether ice machines in Geelong and cooled one of the first mechanically refrigerated breweries.
1824 – 1900 · Engineer · France
Invented the ammonia absorption machine, a fridge powered by heat.
1842 – 1934 · Engineer and professor · Germany
Built reliable ammonia compression machines for breweries and founded Linde.
1872 – 1952 · Chemist · USA
Pioneered refrigerated rail cars and taught families to store food safely in the cold.
1873 – 1930 · Inventor · USA
Patented a ‘refrigerator attachment’ in 1914, one of few women inventors in the field then.
1873 – 1955 · Engineer · Denmark and USA
Designed the sealed compressor of GE's best-selling Monitor-Top fridge.
1898 – 1964 · Physicist · Hungary
Designed a no-moving-parts fridge with Albert Einstein after a deadly gas leak.
1889 – 1944 · Chemist and engineer · USA
Helped create Freon, the CFC refrigerant later found to destroy ozone.
1943 – 2020 · Chemist · Mexico
Showed that CFCs destroy ozone; first Mexican-born Nobel laureate in chemistry.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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