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QUIRKY SCIENCE (EP. 2)
EP. 2. Cooling is more than a luxury. Nowadays it is a necessity. Without refrigerated shipping and stocking, fresh food wouldn’t reach our supermarket so easily. Can you imagine living without it? Before the invention of the refrigerator, icehouses were used to provide cool storage for most of the year. To cool our food and beverages, blocks of ice were simply cut out of frozen lakes and shipped to far and beyond. The so-called ‘ice-industry’ came to its end when, in the late 1900s, our waters became too polluted to serve as a cool preserving agent. Air-conditioning, on the other hand, was actually invented to control the humidity that was ruining the paper of printing offices, rather than the technology being used to cool you off. The quirky part is, you can’t create cold; you can only ‘move’ temperature form one place to another. The first one to find a technology that cooled the inside of a box - the forefather of the refrigerator - was a medical doctor. In fact, he thought he was building a machine to cure malaria. And yet it took over a century after that, before people started using refrigerators, because refrigerators were thought to be dangerous. And they had a point! For a few decades, the refrigerator was something of a killer machine (literally) as they omitted toxic gases that poisoned people… Even Einstein got worried and developed a cooling-machine. And when refrigerators stopped killing people, scientists discovered that refrigerants were harming the environment. All sorts of chemicals have passed through our refrigerator coils, to be discarded… but perhaps we have a new solution: cooling with the vibrations of sound. That does sound cool.
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EP. 2. Cooling is more than a luxury. Nowadays it is a necessity. Without refrigerated shipping and stocking, fresh food wouldn’t reach our supermarket so easily. Can you imagine living without it? Before the invention of the refrigerator, icehouses were used to provide cool storage for most of the year. To cool our food and beverages, blocks of ice were simply cut out of frozen lakes and shipped to far and beyond. The so-called ‘ice-industry’ came to its end when, in the late 1900s, our waters became too polluted to serve as a cool preserving agent. Air-conditioning, on the other hand, was actually invented to control the humidity that was ruining the paper of printing offices, rather than the technology being used to cool you off. The quirky part is, you can’t create cold; you can only ‘move’ temperature form one place to another. The first one to find a technology that cooled the inside of a box - the forefather of the refrigerator - was a medical doctor. In fact, he thought he was building a machine to cure malaria. And yet it took over a century after that, before people started using refrigerators, because refrigerators were thought to be dangerous. And they had a point! For a few decades, the refrigerator was something of a killer machine (literally) as they omitted toxic gases that poisoned people… Even Einstein got worried and developed a cooling-machine. And when refrigerators stopped killing people, scientists discovered that refrigerants were harming the environment. All sorts of chemicals have passed through our refrigerator coils, to be discarded… but perhaps we have a new solution: cooling with the vibrations of sound. That does sound cool.