The milk has gone bad again and it's not even hot out

The iceman comes Thursday. It's Monday, and the milk already smells like Thursday. — Mother of four, 1890

The first electric refrigerator for the home, built in 1913, didn't replace the icebox. It sat on top of it and plugged into the wall. The ones that came after kept food cold with poison gases, and every so often the gas leaked. Then in 1930 a chemist named Thomas Midgley brought out Freon, which wouldn't burn and was safe to breathe. To prove it, he took a lungful in front of a room full of chemists and blew out a candle. Decades later, it turned out Freon was eating the ozone layer. Some fixes need fixing.

Noted: we have refrigerators now, and we still sniff the milk first.

The full file

Before any of that, cold came by wagon. In 1806 a Boston man shipped a boatload of pond ice to the Caribbean and lost money on it. He kept at it. By the 1830s New England ice was being sold as far away as India, and at home it came in blocks for the icebox.

When the gas leaks started making the news, Albert Einstein read about one. In 1926 newspapers reported that an entire family in Berlin had been killed by a leaking refrigerator. With a younger physicist, Leo Szilard, he set out to build one with no moving parts and no seals to leak. The two of them filed more than 45 patent applications in six countries. Nobody ever bought one.

Freon beat them. The smartest man of the century lost to a fellow with a candle.

Relates to No. 09340.