Real Survival Stories - Introducing: The Curious History of Your Home - The Fridge

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

A brand-new podcast from the Noiser network. Join domestic historian Ruth Goodman as she explores the remarkable, often epic, tales behind everyday objects. This taster episode is all about the fridge. In Ancient Persia, ingenious ice houses refrigerate food in one of the hottest deserts on earth. Bronze Age sites on Orkney reveal the secrets of early cold storage systems. A well-known sea captain becomes the face of a frozen food brand, with a little help from the Inuit of northern Canada. And cooling technology becomes a matter of life and death when US President James A. Garfield is shot… If you enjoy this taster episode, search ‘The Curious History of Your Home’ in your podcast app and hit follow to get new episodes every Tuesday. Or follow this link: https://podfollow.com/the-curious-history-of-your-home Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, listeners. We wanted to bring you an episode from Noise's brand new podcast. It's called The Curious History of Your Home. Look around your home. It's full of items that you probably take for granted. Bed, bath, fridge, wallpaper, dishwasher, toothpaste. In fact, hiding in plain sight, these things have extraordinary histories. Join domestic historian Ruth Goodman as she guides you through the remarkable, often epic tales behind everyday objects. If you enjoy this taste episode, search The Curious History of Your Home in your podcast app of choice and hit follow for weekly episodes, or click the link in

the episode description. The year is 400 BC. We're in the Dashd-e-Lud desert in Persia, modern-day Iran. A fierce sun blazes overhead. There's not a single cloud in the sky to soften the relentless heat. Surface temperatures reach 70 degrees Celsius or 159 degrees Fahrenheit. It is one of the hottest and driest places in the world. From time to time, a wind whips across the barren landscape, casting a fine grit into your eyes. If the wind takes hold, it could turn into a sandstorm. Mountains shimmer in the distance. In the spring, water flows down from the heights, but it's summer now

and the streams are all dried up. Sweat leaches from your body, then quickly evaporates. Your mouth and throat feel dry. A raging thirst comes over you. Suddenly, you feel overwhelmed by exhaustion. Your legs buckle as you stagger, a wave of dizziness washing over you. Dehydration is setting in. A vulture circles the sky. If you don't get out of the sun soon, you'll be its next meal. You keep moving. As you skirt a large sand dune on your left,

an immense wall comes into view, stretching 100 metres from east to west. A large conical structure rises to about 20 metres at one end. The building looks like one of those weird shapes that centuries of wind can sculpt out of the rocks, but no, this was made by humans. You notice an arched entrance at its base. A welcome chill greets you as you step inside the refreshingly cool chamber. A shaft of light

streams in through a circular vent in the apex of the cone, your eyes adjust to the gloom. The air inside is not just cold, it's damp. Condensation runs down the walls. Quite a surprise after the arid air outside. You're standing on a ledge. A flight of stairs spirals down to the floor of a subterranean pit. You can feel an icy blast rising up from below. You decide to investigate, immersing yourself in the increasingly cold atmosphere. You reach the bottom of the pit. Goosebumps appear on your arms. You crouch down and lift up the blanket of straw that covers the floor in front of you, shaking your head in disbelief at what you see.

Ice. How can it be? Ice? In the middle of a scorching desert? And with no electricity to power any kind of refrigeration unit. In fact, the structure is a yaksal, one of the world's earliest fridges, powered only by human ingenuity. It's arguably one of the greatest achievements of the ancient world. As agriculture developed, people were able to produce more food than they needed for immediate consumption, but all food starts to go off the moment it's harvested. So the question is, how do you keep your surplus food fresh? An ice house, like the Yaksal,

is one solution. By allowing farmers to store food for longer, developments like the yak shell led to crucial changes in the way people live. Agriculture, food preservation and settled communities go hand in hand. So let's take a look at how the ancient Persian yak shell evolved into the modern fridge in your kitchen. I'm Ruth Goodman. I've spent my life exploring the extraordinary history of everyday items, the little things that we often take for granted. You see, every object in your home has a fascinating, hidden history. A story that's just waiting to be told. This week, we're opening the fridge door and taking a peek behind the yoghurt cartons at the history of this essential appliance.

So come with me, and together we'll explore the curious history of your home. According to a cuneiform inscription dating from 1780 BC, over a thousand years before the earliest Yakschels, King Zimri-Lim built some form of ice house in the city of Turka on the banks of the Euphrates. Even before this, there must have been humbler versions built by ordinary folk, but nobody bothered to record them. But it was Persian Yakschels that represented the pinnacle of ancient ice house technology. So how do they work? A long, shallow pool, fed by canals, is shielded from the heat of the sun by a towering shade wall. It's here where the ice is made overnight in winter. Before dawn, the ice is harvested and transferred to the pit inside the actual, where it's covered with an insulating layer of straw.

The stock of ice is built up over the colder months, while the building's unique design helps it last through summer. To keep the heat out and the cold in, the thick walls are made from a special mortar called sarouge. Sand, limestone and clay are mixed together with some more unusual ingredients including egg whites, goat hair and ash. The result is highly water resistant and an extremely good insulator. More straw is laid on the outside for extra insulation. Inside, the actual temperature is kept low by heat transference. As every schoolchild knows, warm air rises,

in this case escaping through the hole at the top of the pointed ceiling. It leaves a glacial chill in its wake. Simple, but incredibly effective. Ice houses, or ice pits, where ice harvested during the winter was stored, could be found across the ancient Mediterranean and Asia. The Greeks and Romans certainly had them, as did ancient China. By 618 AD, at the start of the Tang dynasty, the Chinese were using them to make a kind of ice cream consisting of frozen buffalo milk flavoured with various fruits and spices. One flavour was camphor, which tastes a bit like mothballs. Thanks, but I think I'll give that one a miss.

The Chinese also used subterranean ice pits to chill out, building cool rooms over them. It must have been wonderfully refreshing in the sultry summer months, provided you were the emperor or part of his retinue. You see, ice stores were exclusively for the elite. This continued to be the case right up to the 17th and 18th centuries when ice houses caught on in England. No self-respecting gentleman would plan his stately home without one, but they were expensive to build and labour-intensive to run. The poor had to find their own ways of preserving essential food stocks.

During the Bronze Age, people in the Orkney Islands had a more humble cold storage system. They would dig a rectangular pit into the floor of their home and line it with stone slabs. As moisture slowly evaporated through the porous stones, it would combine with the cooler ground temperatures to keep food fresh. Meanwhile, further south in Devon, you can still find farmhouses equipped with sunken spaces paved with flagstones. These are dairy rooms from before the days of artificial refrigeration. Here's what's clever. They have an open gully running through them, a tiny rivulet of water diverted from a local stream to flow through the middle of the room.

Not only that, two open windows, one on the north wall and the other on the east, create a cross-draft. The combination of evaporating water and the constant breeze, together with the insulating effect of the sunken floor, maintains the temperature at a few degrees above freezing, perfect for preserving milk, butter and cheese, even in the height of summer. Hi again, listeners. If you're enjoying this episode of Noise's new podcast,

make sure to search for The Curious History of Your Home in your podcast app and hit follow to never miss an episode. Or click the link in the episode description. Now back to the story. You may have noticed that evaporation is a constant feature in all the cold spaces we've looked at so far. It's still an important principle today, even in the most modern refrigeration appliances, which just goes to show how a fundamental insight can continue to shape and develop technology into ever more sophisticated forms. You've probably also spotted that a lot of early food storage systems had sunken floors or subterranean pits. This is because the

earth acts as a form of insulation and the deeper you dig the colder it gets. Then there's also basic physics. Just as warm air rises, cold air settles. In terms of food storage, the Victorian era is the age of the pantry. I once lived as a Victorian for a TV documentary series, so I know firsthand how efficient these walk-in larders are. Here's what to look for in a good Victorian pantry. First, location. Make sure your pantry is placed on the shady side of the house, with no direct sunlight falling on the external walls. You need good ventilation too, with a hatch in the door and an open window. To keep out flies, both of these should be fitted with a mesh.

Go for a stone or tiled floor. And ideally, your pantry should also contain a stone shelf for dairy products. And there you have it. A low-tech way to keep food cool. But while 19th century households were stocking their pantries, the Industrial Revolution was in full flow. This was an era when people believed that there was no problem that couldn't be solved by the appliance of science, technology and human creativity.

The challenge of keeping food fresh was no exception. It's 1850, or thereabouts, in Geelong, Australia, 40 miles southwest of Melbourne. James Harrison, proprietor, editor and printer of the Geelong Advertiser, is hard at work as the latest edition rolls off the presses. Harrison is a Scot. After training as an apprentice in the printing trade, he came to Australia in 1837 at the age of 21. Like many men of his era, Harrison combines down-to-earth practicality with boundless optimism. He's the kind of man who believes anything's possible. And if the world isn't how you want it to be, it's up to you to change it. Harrison is a hands-on kind of newspaper proprietor, which is why today you find him cleaning blocks of metal type.

He uses a cloth soaked with sulfuric ether to make the alloy pieces gleam. The highly volatile ether evaporates quickly. As it does so, Harrison notices something strange happen to the metal. It becomes cold to the touch. Harrison's restless curiosity is piqued. If evaporating ether can cool down metal, perhaps it can do the same to other things. Food, for instance. This is James Harrison's eureka moment. His mind races on suggesting possibilities and imagining opportunities. Until now, his life has been dominated by the newspaper industry. From this moment on, a new consuming passion takes over. Ice making. James Harrison draws up a plan for a machine based on a system of evaporating ether.

Next, he looks for a suitable place to build a working prototype. One day, Harrison takes a boat out on the River Barwon, just outside Geelong. Noticing the entrance to a cave, he steers his boat to the bank. As he steps inside the vast cavern, Harrison is certain he's found the perfect location for his workshop. Now, it may seem an odd choice, but Harrison knows he will be working with concentrated ether, a highly explosive substance when combined with oxygen. It could be dangerous in a typical timber-built workshop next to other buildings. The wisdom of his decision is borne out by a series of setbacks. Fortunately, Harrison and his workforce escape unharmed.

Eventually, James Harrison succeeded in creating an ice-making machine. His invention was taken up by a number of meatpacking and brewery businesses, and he even patented a revolutionary refrigerator in 1860. But despite this, he failed to find commercial success. It didn't help that his first attempt to ship frozen beef from Australia to England in 1873 was a complete disaster, with the machinery failing en route. 25 tonnes of now inedible meat had to be chucked when they arrived in London. Artificial refrigeration was a competitive business. There was always someone else ready

to step in with their new invention if yours failed. Harrison himself had built on the work of earlier inventors, men like Scottish professor Thomas Cullen. He used rapidly evaporating liquid to create a small refrigerating machine as early as 1758. Maybe Cullen was a man ahead of his time but his invention went nowhere the great Michael Faraday also applied himself to the problem of artificially lowering temperatures inventing his own system of refrigeration in 1821 at around the same time as James Harrison was working on his machine in Australia an American physician called John Gorey developed a kind of early air conditioning unit to relieve the suffering

of yellow fever patients. Like Harrison, he caught the refrigeration bug and gave up his medical career to develop his own systems. But he too experienced financial failure. In the end, two European inventors, Ferdinand Carre of France and Karl von Linde of Germany, emerged as the winners in the scramble to develop a viable method of artificial refrigeration. Carre's solution, which he came up with in 1856, was to use rapidly expanding ammonia to create a chill. There was one small problem. Ammonia is a highly toxic substance. When it leaked, people died. Despite the dangers, Carré's refrigerators caught on and the basic principle is still widely used today,

though without the ammonia. von Linn's contribution came in 1876 when he patented a new system of liquefying gas, leading to the development of a reliable and efficient ammonia refrigerator. What this quick survey shows is that no one person was responsible for inventing the modern appliance we call a fridge. A succession of engineers were basically working on the same problem from different angles, adapting each other's ideas and adding their own. It was like a virtual brainstorming session

that lasted a hundred years. In fact, it's still going on today. Isn't that pretty much how technology always advances? Although sometimes a dramatic historical event can help to push things along, or at least illustrate how far technology has come. It's Saturday, July 2nd, 1881. We're in Washington, at the corner of 6th Street and B Street. The red brick building in front of you is the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station. With its high, steeple-like clock tower and imposing facade, the station bears more than a passing resemblance to a cathedral. Crowds of travellers stream purposefully into the station through its arched entrances. Let's join them.

The concourse is filled with a jostling mass of humanity. There's an air of excitement. People are eager to escape the sweltering heat of a Washington summer. One of those preparing to leave the Capitol is a distinguished figure wearing a black top hat and frock coat. This is James A. Garfield, the 20th President of the United States. He is new to the job, having only served since March. President Garfield is accompanied by his two sons, 18-year-old Harry and James, aged 16. There to see him off are his Secretary of State, James Blaine, and Secretary of War, Robert Lincoln. It might surprise you to see that Garfield doesn't have any bodyguards. After all, it was only 16 years earlier that Abraham Lincoln, Robert Lincoln's father,

was assassinated at Ford's Theatre. Garfield has some last-minute business to discuss with Blaine and Lincoln. They go into a waiting room for some quiet. His entrance creates a polite stir. Everyone nods knowingly but discreetly to their neighbour. Then, without warning, all hell breaks loose. From somewhere behind the President, a man rushes forward, revolver in hand. He fires a shot into Garfield's back, then fires again. President Garfield falls to the ground, his top hat skittering away across the floor.

The assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, pockets his weapon and flees, but is arrested by a policeman as he attempts to leave the station. The president is carried back to the White House, where his injuries are assessed by doctors. The first bullet struck a glancing blow, but the second is lodged in his abdomen, dangerously close to his pancreas. The doctors probe the wound with unsterilised fingers, but are unable to find the projectile.

It seems unlikely that he will survive the night. But in the morning, his condition stabilises. Even so, doctors are concerned about the stifling heat in the sick room. Garfield develops a fever, and they struggle to bring his temperature down. Then one of them remembers reading about John Gorey's device to lower the temperature in yellow fever wards. He wonders if something similar can be rigged up in the president's sick room. Navy engineers are called in and presented with the challenge. Building on Gori's ideas,

they construct a rudimentary air conditioning system. It works by blowing hot air across cloths soaked in melted ice water. As the water evaporates, it lowers the temperature in the room by an astonishing 11 degrees Celsius, or 20 degrees Fahrenheit. The cooling machine helped keep President Garfield comfortable. It may even have prolonged his life.

But it wasn't enough to save him. He eventually died from his injuries and the unhygienic attention of his doctors on the 19th of September, 1881. Advances in cooling technology might not have saved President Garfield's life, but they show how people tried to engineer their way out of all kinds of problems in the late 19th century. And in the years after his death, inventors did manage to crack one big refrigeration problem, how to transport food long distances without it going off. It was a development that would have huge impacts on the lives of ordinary people everywhere. To begin with, ice was used to preserve food during transportation. Then, in the mid-1860s, the mechanical refrigeration experiments of our old

friend, James Harrison, and others, reached the shipping industry. We've already heard that Harrison's attempts failed, but in 1882, the-masted sailing ship Dunedin successfully transported the first shipment of frozen meat from New Zealand to England. But one big leap forward in fruit preservation and transportation came at the hands of a man whose surname is probably familiar to you. Clarence Birdseye. It's 1912 in Labrador in northeast Canada. A group of men wrapped in heavy furs are standing around a hole cut in the ice of a frozen lake. Nearby, a team of huskies howl into the wind. The men are local Inuit, apart from one,

an American fur trader called Clarence Birdseye. He watches in fascination as the other men trail fishing lines into the black water beneath the thick ice. All of a sudden, one of the lines tightens. The fisherman, holding it, leaps into action, hauling in his catch. For a split second, the fish thrashes about in the sub-zero temperatures of the air before hanging inertly on the end of the line. The fisherman holds his catch out to Birdseye to examine. The fish is utterly frozen. Birdseye is astonished. It must have happened instantaneously, almost as soon as it broke the surface of the water. The fisherman smiles and presents the American with the frozen fish as a gift. That evening, Birdseye's astonishment turns to delight.

He thaws the fish and cooks it over a campfire. Then he tastes it, and it tastes like no frozen fish he has ever eaten before. You see, at this time, the usual method for meat or fish was to leave it to freeze slowly over ice. In the process, large ice crystals were formed which damaged the cell walls of the flesh and degraded the taste. Basically, frozen fish tasted pretty awful, plus it lost all the nutrients that fresh fish has. But the flash frozen fish of the Inuits was delicious. Birdseye took what he learned and used it to establish one of the most famous frozen food brands in the world. Fish fingers, anyone? Fridges really took off in the 20th century after the invention of the first

electric refrigerator. As the supply of electricity spread, the new appliances found their way into more and more homes, especially in America. Fridges work by causing the coolant circulating inside them to change from a liquid into a gas. The process of evaporation then cools the surrounding area. Even in the 20th century, the coolant used was dangerous ammonia. But in the 1920s, engineers began to look for safer alternatives. A number of synthetic coolants were developed. The best known was Freon. There was just one problem.

Freon was a chlorofluorocarbon, or CFC, which we now know causes ozone depletion. But at the time, it was seen as a miracle substance with no downside. In fact, such was the enthusiasm for Freon that General Motors and DuPont teamed up to produce it on a vast scale. It became the standard coolant for refrigerators. Eventually the world had to face up to just how damaging CFCs were. Their use was largely banned by the 1987 Montreal Protocol. New coolants have been developed since that don't contain cfcs on the plus side they don't damage the ozone layer but there's still greenhouse gases so it's not a perfect solution

today over 98 of homes in the uk have a fridge or freezer. The figure is 99.8 in America. Food can now be stored and shipped more safely. And we can enjoy produce from all over the world. Fridges have changed the way we eat, shop and live. And this shift in lifestyles comes with significant challenges for local farming and the environment, sparking debates about seasonal eating and food miles. In this sense, we could say that artificial refrigeration, like many technological advancements, has opened something of a Pandora's icebox.

All in all, refrigeration technology has come a long way since the ingenious cold storage systems of antiquity. Next time you tiptoe into the kitchen in the dead of night and gently ease open the fridge, cast your mind back to the yak shells of ancient Persia. People back then might have done just the same sort of thing when craving a midnight snack. We hope you enjoyed this Taster episode from Noises' new podcast. To hear more episodes, search for The Curious History of Your Home

in your podcast app of choice and hit follow, or click the link in the episode description.