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Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967) was an English war poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches and satirized the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war. Sassoon became a focal point for dissent within the armed forces when he made a lone protest against the continuation of the war with his "Soldier's Declaration" of July 1917, which resulted in his being sent to the Craiglockhart War Hospital. During this period, Sassoon met and formed a friendship with Wilfred Owen, who was greatly influenced by him. Sassoon later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume, fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the Sherston trilogy.

Early life
Siegfried Sassoon was born to a Jewish father and an Anglo-Catholic mother, and grew up in the neo-gothic mansion named Weirleigh (after its builder Harrison Weir) in Matfield, Kent. His father, Alfred Ezra Sassoon (1861–1895), son of Sassoon David Sassoon, was a member of the wealthy Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon merchant family. For marrying outside the Jewish faith, Alfred was disinherited. Siegfried's mother, Theresa, belonged to the Thornycroft family, sculptors responsible for many of the best-known statues in London—her brother was Sir Hamo Thornycroft.

There was no German ancestry in Sassoon's family; his mother named him Siegfried because of her love of Wagner's operas. His middle name, Loraine, was the surname of a clergyman she respected.

Siegfried was the second of three sons, the others being Michael and Hamo. When he was four years old his parents separated. During his father's weekly visits to the boys, Theresa locked herself in the drawing-room. In 1895 Alfred Sassoon died of tuberculosis.

Sassoon was educated at the New Beacon School, Sevenoaks, Kent; at Marlborough College, Wiltshire; and at Clare College, Cambridge, where from 1905 to 1907 he read history. He left Cambridge without a degree and spent the years after 1907 hunting, playing cricket and writing verse, some of which he published privately.

Although his father had been disinherited from the Sassoon fortune for marrying outside of the Jewish faith, Siegfried had a small private income that allowed him to live modestly without having to earn a living. Later, he was left a large legacy by an aunt, Rachel Beer, allowing him to buy the great estate of Heytesbury House in Wiltshire.

His first published success, "The Daffodil Murderer" (1913), was a parody of John Masefield's The Everlasting Mercy. Robert Graves, in Good-Bye to All That, describes it as a "parody of Masefield which, midway through, had forgotten to be a parody and turned into rather good Masefield."

Cricket
Sassoon played for his village cricket team at a young age, and his brothers and three of his tutors were cricket enthusiasts. The Marchant family were neighbouring landowners, and Frank Marchant was captain of the county side between 1890 and 1897. Sassoon played for his house at Marlborough, once taking 7 wickets for 18 runs, and during this time he contributed three poems to Cricket magazine.

For some years around 1910 he often played for Bluemantles Cricket Club, at the Nevill Ground, in Tunbridge Wells, sometimes alongside Arthur Conan Doyle. He later played for a Downside Abbey team called "The Ravens", continuing playing well into his seventies.

The Western Front: Military Cross
Sassoon joined the Army just as the threat of a new European war was recognized, and was in service with the Sussex Yeomanry on 4 August 1914, the day the United Kingdom declared war on Germany. He broke his arm badly in a riding accident and was put out of action before leaving England, spending the spring of 1915 convalescing. He was commissioned into the 3rd Battalion (Special Reserve), Royal Welch Fusiliers, as a second lieutenant on 29 May 1915.

On 1 November, his younger brother Hamo was killed in the Gallipoli Campaign, dying on board the ship SS Kildonan Castle after having had his leg amputated. In the same month, Siegfried was sent to the 1st Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, in France, where he met Robert Graves, and they became close friends. United by their poetic vocation, they often read and discussed each other's work. Though this did not have much perceptible influence on Graves' poetry, his views on what may be called "gritty realism" profoundly affected Sassoon's concept of what constituted poetry.

He soon became horrified by the realities of war, and the tone of his writing changed completely: where his early poems exhibit a Romantic, dilettantish sweetness, his war poetry moves to an increasingly discordant music, intended to convey the ugly truths of the trenches to an audience hitherto lulled by patriotic propaganda. Details such as rotting corpses, mangled limbs, filth, cowardice and suicide are all trademarks of his work at this time, and this philosophy of "no truth unfitting" had a significant effect on the movement towards Modernist poetry.

Sassoon's periods of duty on the Western Front were marked by exceptionally brave actions, including the single-handed capture of a German trench. Armed with grenades, he scattered sixty German soldiers:"He went over with bombs in daylight, under covering fire from a couple of rifles, and scared away the occupants. A pointless feat, since instead of signalling for reinforcements, he sat down in the German trench and began reading a book of poems which he had brought with him. When he went back he did not even report. Colonel Stockwell, then in command, raged at him. The attack on Mametz Wood had been delayed for two hours because British patrols were still reported to be out. 'British patrols' were Siegfried and his book of poems. 'I'd have got you a DSO, if you'd only shown more sense,' stormed Stockwell."Sassoon's bravery was so inspiring that soldiers of his company said that they felt confident only when they were accompanied by him. He often went out on night raids and bombing patrols, and demonstrated ruthless efficiency as a company commander.

Deepening depression at the horror and misery the soldiers were forced to endure produced in Sassoon a paradoxically manic courage, and he was nicknamed "Mad Jack" by his men for his near-suicidal exploits. On 27 July 1916 he was awarded the Military Cross; the citation read:

"2nd Lt. Siegfried Lorraine [sic] Sassoon, 3rd (attd. 1st) Bn., R. W. Fus.

For conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches. He remained for 1½ hours under rifle and bomb fire collecting and bringing in our wounded. Owing to his courage and determination all the killed and wounded were brought in."

Robert Graves described Sassoon as engaging in suicidal feats of bravery. Sassoon was also later recommended for the Victoria Cross.

War opposition and Craiglockhart
Despite his decorations and reputation, in 1917 Sassoon decided to make a stand against the conduct of the war. One of the reasons for his violent anti-war feeling was the death of his friend David Cuthbert Thomas, who appears as "Dick Tiltwood" in the Sherston trilogy. Sassoon spent years trying to overcome his grief.

In August 1916, Sassoon arrived at Somerville College, Oxford, which was used as a hospital for convalescing officers, with a case of gastric fever. He wrote: "To be lying in a little white-walled room, looking through the window on to a College lawn, was for the first few days very much like a paradise". Graves ended up at Somerville as well. "How unlike you to crib my idea of going to the Ladies' College at Oxford", Sassoon wrote to him in 1917.

At the end of a spell of convalescent leave, Sassoon declined to return to duty; encouraged by pacifist friends such as Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell, he sent a letter to his commanding officer titled Finished with the War: A Soldier's Declaration. Forwarded to the press and read aloud in the House of Commons by a sympathetic member of Parliament, the letter was seen by some as treasonous ("I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority") or at best as condemning the war government's motives ("I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest" ).

Rather than court-martial Sassoon, the Under-Secretary of State for War, Ian Macpherson, decided that he was unfit for service and had him sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, where he officially was treated for neurasthenia ("shell shock").

At the end of 1917, Sassoon was posted to Limerick, Ireland, where in the New Barracks he helped train new recruits. He wrote that it was a period of respite for him, and allowed him to indulge in his love of hunting. Reflecting on the period years later, he mentioned how trouble was brewing in Ireland at the time, in the few years before the Irish War of Independence. After only a short period in Limerick he was posted to Egypt.

For many years it had been thought that, before declining to return to active service, Sassoon had thrown his MC ribbon into the sea at Formby beach. According to his description of this incident in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer he did not do this as a symbolic rejection of militaristic values, but simply out of the need to perform some destructive act in catharsis of the black mood which was afflicting him.

His account states that one of his pre-war sporting trophies, had he had one to hand, would have served his purpose equally well. The actual decoration was rediscovered after the death of Sassoon's only son, George, and subsequently became the subject of a dispute among Sassoon's heirs.

At Craiglockhart, Sassoon met Wilfred Owen, another poet. It was thanks to Sassoon that Owen persevered in his ambition to write better poetry. A manuscript copy of Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth containing Sassoon's handwritten amendments survives as testimony to the extent of his influence and is currently on display at London's Imperial War Museum.

Sassoon became to Owen "Keats and Christ and Elijah", according to a surviving letter which demonstrates the depth of Owen's love and admiration for him. Both men returned to active service in France, but Owen was killed in 1918, a week before Armistice. Sassoon was promoted to lieutenant, and, having spent some time in Palestine, eventually returned to France on 13 July 1918.

Sassoon was wounded again—reportedly by friendly fire when he was injured by a shot to the head by a fellow British soldier who had apparently mistaken him for a German, near Arras, France (per a 2018 story published by a British online tabloid, it was suggested that the friendly fire incident was not accidental, however the veracity of this claim is in some question ). As a result of this injury, he spent the remainder of the war in Britain. By this time, he had been promoted to acting captain. He relinquished his commission on health grounds on 12 March 1919, but retained the rank of captain.

After the war, Sassoon was instrumental in bringing Owen's work to the attention of a wider audience. Their relationship is the subject of Stephen MacDonald's play Not About Heroes.

Editor and novelist

Having lived for a period at Oxford, where he spent more time visiting literary friends than studying, Sassoon dabbled briefly in the politics of the Labour movement. In November 1918, he travelled to Blackburn to support the Labour candidate in the general election, Philip Snowden, who had been a pacifist during the war.

Though a self-confessed political novice, Sassoon delivered campaign speeches for Snowden, later writing that he 'felt grateful for [Snowden's] anti-war attitude in parliament, and had been angered by the abuse thrown at him. All my political sympathies were with him.'

While his commitment to politics waned after this, he remained a supporter of the Labour Party, and in 1929 'rejoiced that [they] had gained seats in the British general election.' Similarly, 'news of the massive Labour victory in 1945 pleased him, because many Tories from the class he had loathed during the First World War had gone.'

In 1919 Sassoon took up a post as literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald. He lived at 54 Tufton Street, Westminster, from 1919 to 1925; the house is no longer standing, but the location of his former home is marked by a memorial plaque.

During his period at the Herald, Sassoon was responsible for employing several eminent names as reviewers, including E. M. Forster and Charlotte Mew, and commissioned original material from writers like Arnold Bennett and Osbert Sitwell. His artistic interests extended to music.

While at Oxford he was introduced to the young William Walton, to whom he became a friend and patron. Walton later dedicated his Portsmouth Point overture to Sassoon in recognition of his financial assistance and moral support.

Sassoon later embarked on a lecture tour of the US, as well as travelling in Europe and throughout Britain. He acquired a car, a gift from the publisher Frankie Schuster, and became renowned among his friends for his lack of driving skill, but this did not prevent him making full use of the mobility it gave him.

Sassoon had expressed his growing sense of identification with German soldiers in poems such as "Reconciliation" (1918), and after the war, he travelled extensively in Germany, visiting the country a number of times over the next decade.

In 1921 Sassoon went to Rome, where he met the Kaiser's nephew, Prince Philipp of Hesse. The two became lovers for a while, later taking a holiday together in Munich. They had become estranged by the mid-1920s, due in part to geographical distance and in part, as Jean Moorcroft Wilson notes, to Sassoon's increasing discomfort over Philipp's growing interest in right-wing politics.

Sassoon continued to visit Germany. In 1927 he travelled to Berlin and Dresden with Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, and in 1929 he accompanied Stephen Tennant on a trip to a sanatorium in the Bavarian countryside.

Sassoon was a great admirer of the Welsh poet Henry Vaughan. On a visit to Wales in 1924, he made a pilgrimage to Vaughan's grave at Llansantffraed, Powys, and there wrote "At the Grave of Henry Vaughan", one of his better-known peacetime poems. The deaths within a short space of time of three of his closest friends – Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy and Frankie Schuster – came as setbacks to his personal happiness.

At the same time, Sassoon was preparing to take a new direction. While in the U.S., he had experimented with a novel. In 1928, he branched into prose, with Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, the anonymously published first volume of a fictionalized autobiography, which was almost immediately accepted as a classic, bringing its author new fame as a prose writer.

The memoir, whose mild-mannered central character is content to do little more than be an idle country gentleman, playing cricket, riding and hunting foxes, is often humorous, revealing a side of Sassoon that had rarely been seen in his work during the war years.

The book won the 1928 James Tait Black Award for fiction. Sassoon followed it with Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936). In later years, he revisited his youth and early manhood with three volumes of genuine autobiography, which were acclaimed. These were The Old Century, The Weald of Youth and Siegfried's Journey.

Homosexuality and affairs
At Craiglockhart, Sassoon had met Wilfred Owen, another war poet. Numerous surviving documents demonstrate clearly the depth of Owen's love and admiration for him. Writing years after Owen died, Sassoon said that "W's death was an unhealed wound, & the ache of it has been with me ever since. I wanted him back – not his poems." Despite sentiments expressed in numerous letters between Sassoon and Owen, there is no support for a physical relationship between them. Both men returned to active service in France, where Owen was killed in 1918.

As Sassoon matured, he had a succession of love affairs with men, including: Although Byam Shaw remained Sassoon's close friend throughout his life, only Tennant made a permanent impression.
 * William Park "Gabriel" Atkin, the landscape architectural and figure painter, draftsman and illustrator
 * Ivor Novello, actor
 * Glen Byam Shaw, actor and Novello's former lover
 * Prince Philipp of Hesse, German aristocrat
 * Beverley Nichols, writer
 * Stephen Tennant, an aristocrat

Introduced by the Sitwells in 1927, Sassoon and Stephen Tennant fell passionately in love, beginning a relationship which lasted nearly six years. Tennant, however, had recurrent tuberculosis, and the strain which that put on their relationship had started to show by the early 1930s. In May 1933, Tennant, then receiving treatment at a sanatorium in Kent, abruptly broke off the relationship, informing Sassoon via a letter written by his physician that he never wanted to see him again. Sassoon was devastated.

When he met his future wife Hester Gatty a few months later, he was still reeling from his break-up with Tennant. Sensing a sympathetic nature, Sassoon confided in Hester about their relationship and, at her suggestion, wrote Tennant a letter to put the past to rest. While he and Tennant exchanged letters, telephone calls and infrequent visits in the years to come, they never resumed their previous relationship.

Marriage and later life
In September 1931, Sassoon rented Fitz House, Teffont Magna, Wiltshire, and began to live there. In December 1933, he married Hester Gatty (daughter of Sir Stephen Gatty), who was 20 years his junior, and soon afterwards they moved to Heytesbury House.

The marriage led to the birth of a child, something Sassoon had purportedly craved for a long time. Siegfried's son, George Sassoon (1936–2006), became a scientist, linguist, and author, and was adored by Siegfried, who wrote several poems addressed to him. Siegfried's marriage broke down after the Second World War, with Sassoon apparently unable to find a compromise between the solitude he enjoyed and the companionship he needed.

Separated from his wife in 1945, Sassoon lived in seclusion at Heytesbury in Wiltshire, but he maintained contact with a circle which included E. M. Forster and J. R. Ackerley. One of his closer friends was the cricketer Dennis Silk who later became Warden (headmaster) of Radley College. He also formed a close friendship with Vivien Hancock, then headmistress of Greenways School at Ashton Gifford House, Wiltshire, where his son George was a pupil. The relationship provoked Hester to make strong accusations against Hancock, who responded with the threat of legal action.

Religion
In 1957, Sassoon converted to Catholicism.

After a lifetime of grappling with questions of faith and spirituality, Sassoon made the decision to convert to Catholicism. His motivation for this conversion has been the subject of much speculation and analysis.

While the exact reasons behind Sassoon's conversion to Catholicism can never be fully known, the convergence of intellectual exploration, aesthetic appeal, spiritual seeking, and the influence of figures like Ronald Knox provides a compelling framework for understanding his motivations. Sassoon's decision to convert represents an important chapter in his personal and spiritual evolution, adding depth and complexity to his already significant legacy as a poet and writer.

Death and awards
Sassoon was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1951 New Year Honours. He died from stomach cancer on 1 September 1967, one week before his 81st birthday.

He is buried at St Andrew's Church, Mells, Somerset, not far from the grave of Father Ronald Knox, whom he so admired. His CBE, MC and campaign medals are on display at the Royal Welch Fusiliers Museum at Caernarfon Castle.

Legacy
On 11 November 1985, Sassoon was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription on the stone was taken from Wilfred Owen's "Preface" to his poems and reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

The year 2003 saw the publication of Memorial Tablet, an authorised audio CD of readings by Sassoon recorded during the late 1950s. These included extracts from Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and The Weald of Youth as well as several war poems, including "Attack", "The Dug-Out", "At Carnoy" and "Died of Wounds", and postwar works. The CD also included comment on Sassoon by three of his Great War contemporaries: Edmund Blunden, Edgell Rickword and Henry Williamson.

Siegfried Sassoon's only child, George Sassoon, died of cancer in 2006. George had three children, two of whom were killed in a car crash in 1996. His daughter by his first marriage, Kendall Sassoon, is patron-in-chief of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship, established in 2001.

Sassoon's Military Cross was rediscovered by his family in May 2007 and was put up for sale. It was bought by the Royal Welch Fusiliers for display at their museum in Caernarfon. Sassoon's other service medals went unclaimed until 1985 when his son George obtained them from the Army Medal Office, then based at Droitwich. The "late claim" medals consisting of the 1914–15 Star, Victory Medal and British War Medal along with Sassoon's CBE and Warrant of Appointment were auctioned by Sotheby's in 2008.

In June 2009, the University of Cambridge announced plans to purchase an archive of Sassoon's papers from his family, to be added to the university library's Sassoon collection. On 4 November 2009, it was reported that this purchase would be supported by £550,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, meaning that the University still needed to raise a further £110,000 on top of the money already received to meet the full £1.25 million asking price.

The funds were raised and in December 2009 it was announced that the University had received the papers. Included in the collection are war diaries kept by Sassoon while he served on the Western Front and in Palestine, a draft of "A Soldier's Declaration" (1917), notebooks from his schooldays and post-war journals.

Other items in the collection include love letters to his wife Hester and photographs and letters from other writers. Sassoon was an undergraduate at the university, as well as being made an honorary fellow of Clare College; the collection is housed at the Cambridge University Library. As well as private individuals, funding came from the Monument Trust, the JP Getty Jr Trust and Sir Siegmund Warburg's Voluntary Settlement.

In 2010, Dream Voices: Siegfried Sassoon, Memory and War, a major exhibition of Sassoon's life and archive, was held at Cambridge University. Several of Sassoon's poems have been set to music, some during his life, by Cyril Rootham, who co-operated with the author.

The discovery in 2013 of an early draft of one of Sassoon's best-known anti-war poems had a biographer saying she would rewrite portions of her work about the poet. In the poem "Atrocities", which concerned the killing of German prisoners of war by Allied troops, the early draft shows that some lines were cut and others diluted. The poet's publisher was nervous about publishing the poem and held it for publication in an expurgated version at a later date. Sassoon biographer Jean Moorcroft Wilson said "This is very exciting material. I want to rewrite my biography and I probably shall be able to get some of it in. It's a treasure trove". In early 2019, it was announced in The Guardian that a student from the University of Warwick, whilst looking through Glen Byam Shaw's records at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, had serendipitously discovered a Sassoon poem addressed to the former, which had not been published in its entirety.

Poetry collections
• The Daffodil Murderer (John Richmond: 1913)

• The Old Huntsman (Heinemann: 1917)

• The General (Denmark Hill Hospital, April 1917)

• Does it Matter? (written: 1917)

• Counter-Attack and Other Poems (Heinemann: 1918)

• The Hero [Henry Holt, 1918]

• Picture-Show (Heinemann: 1919)

• War Poems (Heinemann: 1919)

• Aftermath (Heinemann: 1920)

• Recreations (privately printed: 1923)

• Lingual Exercises for Advanced Vocabularians (privately printed: 1925)

• Selected Poems (Heinemann: 1925)

• Satirical Poems (Heinemann: 1926)

• The Heart's Journey (Heinemann: 1928)

• Poems by Pinchbeck Lyre (Duckworth: 1931)

• The Road to Ruin (Faber and Faber: 1933)

• Vigils (Heinemann: 1935)

• Rhymed Ruminations (Faber and Faber: 1940)

• Poems Newly Selected (Faber and Faber: 1940)

• Collected Poems (Faber and Faber: 1947)

• Common Chords (privately printed: 1950/1951)

• Emblems of Experience (privately printed: 1951)

• The Tasking (privately printed: 1954)

• Sequences (Faber and Faber: 1956)

• Lenten Illuminations (Downside Abbey: 1959)

• The Path to Peace (Stanbrook Abbey Press: 1960)

• Collected Poems 1908–1956 (Faber and Faber: 1961)

• The War Poems ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (Faber and Faber: 1983)

Prose books

 * Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (Faber & Gwyer: 1928)
 * Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (Faber and Faber: 1930)
 * Sherston's Progress (Faber and Faber: 1936)
 * The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (Faber and Faber: 1937)
 * The Old Century and seven more years (Faber and Faber: 1938)
 * On Poetry (University of Bristol Press: 1939)
 * The Weald of Youth (Faber and Faber: 1942)
 * Siegfried's Journey, 1916–1920 (Faber and Faber: 1945)
 * Meredith (Constable: 1948) – biography of George Meredith

In popular culture
A 1970 installment of The Wednesday Play titled Mad Jack based on Sassoon's wartime experiences and their aftermath leading to his renunciation of his Military Cross starred Michael Jayston as Sassoon.

The novel Regeneration by Pat Barker is a fictionalized account of this period in Sassoon's life, and was made into a film starring James Wilby as Sassoon and Jonathan Pryce as W. H. R. Rivers, the psychiatrist responsible for Sassoon's treatment. Rivers became a kind of surrogate father to the troubled young man, and his sudden death in 1922 was a major blow to Sassoon.

In 2014, John Hurt played the older Sassoon and Morgan Watkins the young Sassoon in The Pity of War, a BBC dramatized documentary.

A film titled The Burying Party (released August 2018) depicts Wilfred Owen's final year from Craiglockhart Hospital to the Battle of the Sambre (1918), including his meeting with Sassoon at the hospital. Matthew Staite stars as Owen and Sid Phoenix as Sassoon.

Peter Capaldi and Jack Lowden portrayed Sassoon in Terence Davies' 2021 film Benediction.

Timothy Renouf portrayed Sassoon in The Laureate, a 2021 biographical film about Robert Graves.

Stevan Rimkus portrayed Sassoon in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles episode Somme, Early August 1916.

Additional reading

 * Roy Pinaki. "Comrades-in-Arms: A Very Brief Study of Sassoon and Owen as Twentieth-Century English War Poets". Twentieth-century British Literature: Reconstructing Literary Sensibility. Ed. Nawale, A., Z. Mitra, and A. John. New Delhi: Gnosis, 2013 (ISBN 978-93-81030-47-9). pp. 61–78.
 * Siegfried Sassoon collection of papers, 1905–1975, bulk (1915–1951) (669 items) are held at the New York Public Library.
 * Siegfried Sassoon papers, 1894–1966 (3 linear ft. (c. 630 items in 4 boxes & 13 slipcases)) are held at Columbia University Libraries.
 * Siegfried Sassoon papers, 1908–1966 (109 items) are held in the Rutgers University Libraries.
 * 'The Jewishness of Siegfried Sassoon' by Martin Sugarman (AJEX Archivist) in the Journal of the Siegfried Fellowship
 * 'The Jewishness of Siegfried Sassoon' by Martin Sugarman (AJEX Archivist) in the Journal of the Siegfried Fellowship

title: Siegfried Sassoon


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Refrigeration

Refrigeration is any of various types of cooling of a space, substance, or system to lower and/or maintain its temperature below the ambient one (while the removed heat is ejected to a place of higher temperature). Refrigeration is an artificial, or human-made, cooling method.

Refrigeration refers to the process by which energy, in the form of heat, is removed from a low-temperature medium and transferred to a high-temperature medium. This work of energy transfer is traditionally driven by mechanical means (whether ice or electromechanical machines), but it can also be driven by heat, magnetism, electricity, laser, or other means. Refrigeration has many applications, including household refrigerators, industrial freezers, cryogenics, and air conditioning. Heat pumps may use the heat output of the refrigeration process, and also may be designed to be reversible, but are otherwise similar to air conditioning units.

Refrigeration has had a large impact on industry, lifestyle, agriculture, and settlement patterns. The idea of preserving food dates back to human prehistory, but for thousands of years humans were limited regarding the means of doing so. They used curing via salting and drying, and they made use of natural coolness in caves, root cellars, and winter weather, but other means of cooling were unavailable. In the 19th century, they began to make use of the ice trade to develop cold chains. In the late 19th through mid-20th centuries, mechanical refrigeration was developed, improved, and greatly expanded in its reach. Refrigeration has thus rapidly evolved in the past century, from ice harvesting to temperature-controlled rail cars, refrigerator trucks, and ubiquitous refrigerators and freezers in both stores and homes in many countries. The introduction of refrigerated rail cars contributed to the settlement of areas that were not on earlier main transport channels such as rivers, harbors, or valley trails.

These new settlement patterns sparked the building of large cities which are able to thrive in areas that were otherwise thought to be inhospitable, such as Houston, Texas, and Las Vegas, Nevada. In most developed countries, cities are heavily dependent upon refrigeration in supermarkets in order to obtain their food for daily consumption. The increase in food sources has led to a larger concentration of agricultural sales coming from a smaller percentage of farms. Farms today have a much larger output per person in comparison to the late 1800s. This has resulted in new food sources available to entire populations, which has had a large impact on the nutrition of society.

Earliest forms of cooling
The seasonal harvesting of snow and ice is an ancient practice estimated to have begun earlier than 1000 BC. A Chinese collection of lyrics from this time period known as the Sleaping, describes religious ceremonies for filling and emptying ice cellars. However, little is known about the construction of these ice cellars or the purpose of the ice. The next ancient society to record the harvesting of ice may have been the Jews in the book of Proverbs, which reads, "As the cold of snow in the time of harvest, so is a faithful messenger to them who sent him." Historians have interpreted this to mean that the Jews used ice to cool beverages rather than to preserve food. Other ancient cultures such as the Greeks and the Romans dug large snow pits insulated with grass, chaff, or branches of trees as cold storage. Like the Jews, the Greeks and Romans did not use ice and snow to preserve food, but primarily as a means to cool beverages. Egyptians cooled water by evaporation in shallow earthen jars on the roofs of their houses at night. The ancient people of India used this same concept to produce ice. The Persians stored ice in a pit called a Yakhchal and may have been the first group of people to use cold storage to preserve food. In the Australian outback before a reliable electricity supply was available many farmers used a Coolgardie safe, consisting of a room with hessian (burlap) curtains hanging from the ceiling soaked in water. The water would evaporate and thereby cool the room, allowing many perishables such as fruit, butter, and cured meats to be kept.

Ice harvesting
Before 1830, few Americans used ice to refrigerate foods due to a lack of ice-storehouses and iceboxes. As these two things became more widely available, individuals used axes and saws to harvest ice for their storehouses. This method proved to be difficult, dangerous, and certainly did not resemble anything that could be duplicated on a commercial scale.

Despite the difficulties of harvesting ice, Frederic Tudor thought that he could capitalize on this new commodity by harvesting ice in New England and shipping it to the Caribbean islands as well as the southern states. In the beginning, Tudor lost thousands of dollars, but eventually turned a profit as he constructed icehouses in Charleston, Virginia and in the Cuban port town of Havana. These icehouses as well as better insulated ships helped reduce ice wastage from 66% to 8%. This efficiency gain influenced Tudor to expand his ice market to other towns with icehouses such as New Orleans and Savannah. This ice market further expanded as harvesting ice became faster and cheaper after one of Tudor's suppliers, Nathaniel Wyeth, invented a horse-drawn ice cutter in 1825. This invention as well as Tudor's success inspired others to get involved in the ice trade and the ice industry grew.

Ice became a mass-market commodity by the early 1830s with the price of ice dropping from six cents per pound to a half of a cent per pound. In New York City, ice consumption increased from 12,000 tons in 1843 to 100,000 tons in 1856. Boston's consumption leapt from 6,000 tons to 85,000 tons during that same period. Ice harvesting created a "cooling culture" as majority of people used ice and iceboxes to store their dairy products, fish, meat, and even fruits and vegetables. These early cold storage practices paved the way for many Americans to accept the refrigeration technology that would soon take over the country.

Refrigeration research
The history of artificial refrigeration began when Scottish professor William Cullen designed a small refrigerating machine in 1755. Cullen used a pump to create a partial vacuum over a container of diethyl ether, which then boiled, absorbing heat from the surrounding air. The experiment even created a small amount of ice, but had no practical application at that time.

In 1758, Benjamin Franklin and John Hadley, professor of chemistry, collaborated on a project investigating the principle of evaporation as a means to rapidly cool an object at Cambridge University, England. They confirmed that the evaporation of highly volatile liquids, such as alcohol and ether, could be used to drive down the temperature of an object past the freezing point of water. They conducted their experiment with the bulb of a mercury thermometer as their object and with a bellows used to quicken the evaporation; they lowered the temperature of the thermometer bulb down to 7 °F, while the ambient temperature was 65 °F. They noted that soon after they passed the freezing point of water 0 °C, a thin film of ice formed on the surface of the thermometer's bulb and that the ice mass was about a 1/4 in thick when they stopped the experiment upon reaching 7 °F. Franklin wrote, "From this experiment, one may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer's day". In 1805, American inventor Oliver Evans described a closed vapor-compression refrigeration cycle for the production of ice by ether under vacuum.

In 1820, the English scientist Michael Faraday liquefied ammonia and other gases by using high pressures and low temperatures, and in 1834, an American expatriate to Great Britain, Jacob Perkins, built the first working vapor-compression refrigeration system in the world. It was a closed-cycle that could operate continuously, as he described in his patent:
 * I am enabled to use volatile fluids for the purpose of producing the cooling or freezing of fluids, and yet at the same time constantly condensing such volatile fluids, and bringing them again into operation without waste.

His prototype system worked although it did not succeed commercially.

In 1842, a similar attempt was made by American physician, John Gorrie, who built a working prototype, but it was a commercial failure. Like many of the medical experts during this time, Gorrie thought too much exposure to tropical heat led to mental and physical degeneration, as well as the spread of diseases such as malaria. He conceived the idea of using his refrigeration system to cool the air for comfort in homes and hospitals to prevent disease. American engineer Alexander Twining took out a British patent in 1850 for a vapour compression system that used ether.

The first practical vapour-compression refrigeration system was built by James Harrison, a British journalist who had emigrated to Australia. His 1856 patent was for a vapour-compression system using ether, alcohol, or ammonia. He built a mechanical ice-making machine in 1851 on the banks of the Barwon River at Rocky Point in Geelong, Victoria, and his first commercial ice-making machine followed in 1854. Harrison also introduced commercial vapour-compression refrigeration to breweries and meat-packing houses, and by 1861, a dozen of his systems were in operation. He later entered the debate of how to compete against the American advantage of unrefrigerated beef sales to the United Kingdom. In 1873 he prepared the sailing ship Norfolk for an experimental beef shipment to the United Kingdom, which used a cold room system instead of a refrigeration system. The venture was a failure as the ice was consumed faster than expected.

The first gas absorption refrigeration system using gaseous ammonia dissolved in water (referred to as "aqua ammonia") was developed by Ferdinand Carré of France in 1859 and patented in 1860. Carl von Linde, an engineer specializing in steam locomotives and professor of engineering at the Technological University of Munich in Germany, began researching refrigeration in the 1860s and 1870s in response to demand from brewers for a technology that would allow year-round, large-scale production of lager; he patented an improved method of liquefying gases in 1876. His new process made possible using gases such as ammonia, sulfur dioxide (SO2) and methyl chloride (CH3Cl) as refrigerants and they were widely used for that purpose until the late 1920s.

Thaddeus Lowe, an American balloonist, held several patents on ice-making machines. His "Compression Ice Machine" would revolutionize the cold-storage industry. In 1869, he and other investors purchased an old steamship onto which they loaded one of Lowe's refrigeration units and began shipping fresh fruit from New York to the Gulf Coast area, and fresh meat from Galveston, Texas back to New York, but because of Lowe's lack of knowledge about shipping, the business was a costly failure.

Commercial use
In 1842, John Gorrie created a system capable of refrigerating water to produce ice. Although it was a commercial failure, it inspired scientists and inventors around the world. France's Ferdinand Carre was one of the inspired and he created an ice producing system that was simpler and smaller than that of Gorrie. During the Civil War, cities such as New Orleans could no longer get ice from New England via the coastal ice trade. Carre's refrigeration system became the solution to New Orleans' ice problems and, by 1865, the city had three of Carre's machines. In 1867, in San Antonio, Texas, a French immigrant named Andrew Muhl built an ice-making machine to help service the expanding beef industry before moving it to Waco in 1871. In 1873, the patent for this machine was contracted by the Columbus Iron Works, a company acquired by the W.C. Bradley Co., which went on to produce the first commercial ice-makers in the US.

By the 1870s, breweries had become the largest users of harvested ice. Though the ice-harvesting industry had grown immensely by the turn of the 20th century, pollution and sewage had begun to creep into natural ice, making it a problem in the metropolitan suburbs. Eventually, breweries began to complain of tainted ice. Public concern for the purity of water, from which ice was formed, began to increase in the early 1900s with the rise of germ theory. Numerous media outlets published articles connecting diseases such as typhoid fever with natural ice consumption. This caused ice harvesting to become illegal in certain areas of the country. All of these scenarios increased the demands for modern refrigeration and manufactured ice. Ice producing machines like that of Carre's and Muhl's were looked to as means of producing ice to meet the needs of grocers, farmers, and food shippers.

Refrigerated railroad cars were introduced in the US in the 1840s for short-run transport of dairy products, but these used harvested ice to maintain a cool temperature.

The new refrigerating technology first met with widespread industrial use as a means to freeze meat supplies for transport by sea in reefer ships from the British Dominions and other countries to the British Isles. Although not actually the first to achieve successful transportation of frozen goods overseas (the Strathleven had arrived at the London docks on 2 February 1880 with a cargo of frozen beef, mutton and butter from Sydney and Melbourne ), the breakthrough is often attributed to William Soltau Davidson, an entrepreneur who had emigrated to New Zealand. Davidson thought that Britain's rising population and meat demand could mitigate the slump in world wool markets that was heavily affecting New Zealand. After extensive research, he commissioned the Dunedin to be refitted with a compression refrigeration unit for meat shipment in 1881. On February 15, 1882, the Dunedin sailed for London with what was to be the first commercially successful refrigerated shipping voyage, and the foundation of the refrigerated meat industry.

The Times commented "Today we have to record such a triumph over physical difficulties, as would have been incredible, even unimaginable, a very few days ago...". The Marlborough—sister ship to the Dunedin – was immediately converted and joined the trade the following year, along with the rival New Zealand Shipping Company vessel Mataurua, while the German Steamer Marsala began carrying frozen New Zealand lamb in December 1882. Within five years, 172 shipments of frozen meat were sent from New Zealand to the United Kingdom, of which only 9 had significant amounts of meat condemned. Refrigerated shipping also led to a broader meat and dairy boom in Australasia and South America. J & E Hall of Dartford, England outfitted the SS Selembria with a vapor compression system to bring 30,000 carcasses of mutton from the Falkland Islands in 1886. In the years ahead, the industry rapidly expanded to Australia, Argentina and the United States.

By the 1890s, refrigeration played a vital role in the distribution of food. The meat-packing industry relied heavily on natural ice in the 1880s and continued to rely on manufactured ice as those technologies became available. By 1900, the meat-packing houses of Chicago had adopted ammonia-cycle commercial refrigeration. By 1914, almost every location used artificial refrigeration. The major meat packers, Armour, Swift, and Wilson, had purchased the most expensive units which they installed on train cars and in branch houses and storage facilities in the more remote distribution areas.

By the middle of the 20th century, refrigeration units were designed for installation on trucks or lorries. Refrigerated vehicles are used to transport perishable goods, such as frozen foods, fruit and vegetables, and temperature-sensitive chemicals. Most modern refrigerators keep the temperature between –40 and –20 °C, and have a maximum payload of around 24,000 kg gross weight (in Europe).

Although commercial refrigeration quickly progressed, it had limitations that prevented it from moving into the household. First, most refrigerators were far too large. Some of the commercial units being used in 1910 weighed between five and two hundred tons. Second, commercial refrigerators were expensive to produce, purchase, and maintain. Lastly, these refrigerators were unsafe. It was not uncommon for commercial refrigerators to catch fire, explode, or leak toxic gases. Refrigeration did not become a household technology until these three challenges were overcome.

Home and consumer use

During the early 1800s, consumers preserved their food by storing food and ice purchased from ice harvesters in iceboxes. In 1803, Thomas Moore patented a metal-lined butter-storage tub which became the prototype for most iceboxes. These iceboxes were used until nearly 1910 and the technology did not progress. In fact, consumers that used the icebox in 1910 faced the same challenge of a moldy and stinky icebox that consumers had in the early 1800s.

General Electric (GE) was one of the first companies to overcome these challenges. In 1911, GE released a household refrigeration unit that was powered by gas. The use of gas eliminated the need for an electric compressor motor and decreased the size of the refrigerator. However, electric companies that were customers of GE did not benefit from a gas-powered unit. Thus, GE invested in developing an electric model. In 1927, GE released the Monitor Top, the first refrigerator to run on electricity.

In 1930, Frigidaire, one of GE's main competitors, synthesized Freon. With the invention of synthetic refrigerants based mostly on a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) chemical, safer refrigerators were possible for home and consumer use. Freon led to the development of smaller, lighter, and cheaper refrigerators. The average price of a refrigerator dropped from $275 to $154 with the synthesis of Freon. This lower price allowed ownership of refrigerators in American households to exceed 50% by 1940. Freon is a trademark of the DuPont Corporation and refers to these CFCs, and later hydro chlorofluorocarbon (HCFC) and hydro fluorocarbon (HFC), refrigerants developed in the late 1920s. These refrigerants were considered — at the time — to be less harmful than the commonly-used refrigerants of the time, including methyl formate, ammonia, methyl chloride, and sulfur dioxide. The intent was to provide refrigeration equipment for home use without danger. These CFC refrigerants answered that need. In the 1970s, though, the compounds were found to be reacting with atmospheric ozone, an important protection against solar ultraviolet radiation, and their use as a refrigerant worldwide was curtailed in the Montreal Protocol of 1987.

Impact on settlement patterns in the United States of America
In the last century, refrigeration allowed new settlement patterns to emerge. This new technology has allowed for new areas to be settled that are not on a natural channel of transport such as a river, valley trail or harbor that may have otherwise not been settled. Refrigeration has given opportunities to early settlers to expand westward and into rural areas that were unpopulated. These new settlers with rich and untapped soil saw opportunity to profit by sending raw goods to the eastern cities and states. In the 20th century, refrigeration has made "Galactic Cities" such as Dallas, Phoenix and Los Angeles possible.

Refrigerated rail cars
The refrigerated rail car (refrigerated van or refrigerator car), along with the dense railroad network, became an exceedingly important link between the marketplace and the farm allowing for a national opportunity rather than a just a regional one. Before the invention of the refrigerated rail car, it was impossible to ship perishable food products long distances. The beef packing industry made the first demand push for refrigeration cars. The railroad companies were slow to adopt this new invention because of their heavy investments in cattle cars, stockyards, and feedlots. Refrigeration cars were also complex and costly compared to other rail cars, which also slowed the adoption of the refrigerated rail car. After the slow adoption of the refrigerated car, the beef packing industry dominated the refrigerated rail car business with their ability to control ice plants and the setting of icing fees. The United States Department of Agriculture estimated that, in 1916, over sixty-nine percent of the cattle killed in the country was done in plants involved in interstate trade. The same companies that were also involved in the meat trade later implemented refrigerated transport to include vegetables and fruit. The meat packing companies had much of the expensive machinery, such as refrigerated cars, and cold storage facilities that allowed for them to effectively distribute all types of perishable goods. During World War I, a national refrigerator car pool was established by the United States Administration to deal with problem of idle cars and was later continued after the war. The idle car problem was the problem of refrigeration cars sitting pointlessly in between seasonal harvests. This meant that very expensive cars sat in rail yards for a good portion of the year while making no revenue for the car's owner. The car pool was a system where cars were distributed to areas as crops matured ensuring maximum use of the cars. Refrigerated rail cars moved eastward from vineyards, orchards, fields, and gardens in western states to satisfy Americas consuming market in the east. The refrigerated car made it possible to transport perishable crops hundreds and even thousands of kilometres or miles. The most noticeable effect the car gave was a regional specialization of vegetables and fruits. The refrigeration rail car was widely used for the transportation of perishable goods up until the 1950s. By the 1960s, the nation's interstate highway system was adequately complete allowing for trucks to carry the majority of the perishable food loads and to push out the old system of the refrigerated rail cars.

Expansion west and into rural areas
The widespread use of refrigeration allowed for a vast amount of new agricultural opportunities to open up in the United States. New markets emerged throughout the United States in areas that were previously uninhabited and far-removed from heavily populated areas. New agricultural opportunity presented itself in areas that were considered rural, such as states in the south and in the west. Shipments on a large scale from the south and California were both made around the same time, although natural ice was used from the Sierras in California rather than manufactured ice in the south. Refrigeration allowed for many areas to specialize in the growing of specific fruits. California specialized in several fruits, grapes, peaches, pears, plums, and apples, while Georgia became famous for specifically its peaches. In California, the acceptance of the refrigerated rail cars led to an increase of car loads from 4,500 carloads in 1895 to between 8,000 and 10,000 carloads in 1905. The Gulf States, Arkansas, Missouri and Tennessee entered into strawberry production on a large-scale while Mississippi became the center of the tomato industry. New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada grew cantaloupes. Without refrigeration, this would have not been possible. By 1917, well-established fruit and vegetable areas that were close to eastern markets felt the pressure of competition from these distant specialized centers. Refrigeration was not limited to meat, fruit and vegetables but it also encompassed dairy product and dairy farms. In the early twentieth century, large cities got their dairy supply from farms as far as 400 mi. Dairy products were not as easily transported over great distances like fruits and vegetables due to greater perishability. Refrigeration made production possible in the west far from eastern markets, so much in fact that dairy farmers could pay transportation cost and still undersell their eastern competitors. Refrigeration and the refrigerated rail gave opportunity to areas with rich soil far from natural channel of transport such as a river, valley trail or harbors.

Rise of the galactic city
"Edge city" was a term coined by Joel Garreau, whereas the term "galactic city" was coined by Lewis Mumford. These terms refer to a concentration of business, shopping, and entertainment outside a traditional downtown or central business district in what had previously been a residential or rural area. There were several factors contributing to the growth of these cities such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Houston, and Phoenix. The factors that contributed to these large cities include reliable automobiles, highway systems, refrigeration, and agricultural production increases. Large cities such as the ones mentioned above have not been uncommon in history, but what separates these cities from the rest are that these cities are not along some natural channel of transport, or at some crossroad of two or more channels such as a trail, harbor, mountain, river, or valley. These large cities have been developed in areas that only a few hundred years ago would have been uninhabitable. Without a cost efficient way of cooling air and transporting water and food from great distances, these large cities would have never developed. The rapid growth of these cities was influenced by refrigeration and an agricultural productivity increase, allowing more distant farms to effectively feed the population.

Impact on agriculture and food production
Agriculture's role in developed countries has drastically changed in the last century due to many factors, including refrigeration. Statistics from the 2007 census gives information on the large concentration of agricultural sales coming from a small portion of the existing farms in the United States today. This is a partial result of the market created for the frozen meat trade by the first successful shipment of frozen sheep carcasses coming from New Zealand in the 1880s. As the market continued to grow, regulations on food processing and quality began to be enforced. Eventually, electricity was introduced into rural homes in the United States, which allowed refrigeration technology to continue to expand on the farm, increasing output per person. Today, refrigeration's use on the farm reduces humidity levels, avoids spoiling due to bacterial growth, and assists in preservation.

Demographics
The introduction of refrigeration and evolution of additional technologies drastically changed agriculture in the United States. During the beginning of the 20th century, farming was a common occupation and lifestyle for United States citizens, as most farmers actually lived on their farm. In 1935, there were 6.8 million farms in the United States and a population of 127 million. Yet, while the United States population has continued to climb, citizens pursuing agriculture continue to decline. Based on the 2007 US Census, less than one percent of a population of 310 million people claim farming as an occupation today. However, the increasing population has led to an increasing demand for agricultural products, which is met through a greater variety of crops, fertilizers, pesticides, and improved technology. Improved technology has decreased the risk and time involved for agricultural management and allows larger farms to increase their output per person to meet society's demand.

Meat packing and trade
Prior to 1882, the South Island of New Zealand had been experimenting with sowing grass and crossbreeding sheep, which immediately gave their farmers economic potential in the exportation of meat. In 1882, the first successful shipment of sheep carcasses was sent from Port Chalmers in Dunedin, New Zealand, to London. By the 1890s, the frozen meat trade became increasingly more profitable in New Zealand, especially in Canterbury, where 50% of exported sheep carcasses came from in 1900. It was not long before Canterbury meat was known for the highest quality, creating a demand for New Zealand meat around the world. In order to meet this new demand, the farmers improved their feed so sheep could be ready for the slaughter in only seven months. This new method of shipping led to an economic boom in New Zealand by the mid 1890s.

In the United States, the Meat Inspection Act of 1891 was put in place in the United States because local butchers felt the refrigerated railcar system was unwholesome. When meat packing began to take off, consumers became nervous about the quality of the meat for consumption. Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle brought negative attention to the meat packing industry, by drawing to light unsanitary working conditions and processing of diseased animals. The book caught the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt, and the 1906 Meat Inspection Act was put into place as an amendment to the Meat Inspection Act of 1891. This new act focused on the quality of the meat and environment it is processed in.

Electricity in rural areas
In the early 1930s, 90 percent of the urban population of the United States had electric power, in comparison to only 10 percent of rural homes. At the time, power companies did not feel that extending power to rural areas (rural electrification) would produce enough profit to make it worth their while. However, in the midst of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt realized that rural areas would continue to lag behind urban areas in both poverty and production if they were not electrically wired. On May 11, 1935, the president signed an executive order called the Rural Electrification Administration, also known as REA. The agency provided loans to fund electric infrastructure in the rural areas. In just a few years, 300,000 people in rural areas of the United States had received power in their homes.

While electricity dramatically improved working conditions on farms, it also had a large impact on the safety of food production. Refrigeration systems were introduced to the farming and food distribution processes, which helped in food preservation and kept food supplies safe. Refrigeration also allowed for shipment of perishable commodities throughout the United States. As a result, United States farmers quickly became the most productive in the world, and entire new food systems arose.

Farm use
In order to reduce humidity levels and spoiling due to bacterial growth, refrigeration is used for meat, produce, and dairy processing in farming today. Refrigeration systems are used the heaviest in the warmer months for farming produce, which must be cooled as soon as possible in order to meet quality standards and increase the shelf life. Meanwhile, dairy farms refrigerate milk year round to avoid spoiling.

Effects on lifestyle and diet
In the late 19th Century and into the very early 20th Century, except for staple foods (sugar, rice, and beans) that needed no refrigeration, the available foods were affected heavily by the seasons and what could be grown locally. Refrigeration has removed these limitations. Refrigeration played a large part in the feasibility and then popularity of the modern supermarket. Fruits and vegetables out of season, or grown in distant locations, are now available at relatively low prices. Refrigerators have led to a huge increase in meat and dairy products as a portion of overall supermarket sales. As well as changing the goods purchased at the market, the ability to store these foods for extended periods of time has led to an increase in leisure time. Prior to the advent of the household refrigerator, people would have to shop on a daily basis for the supplies needed for their meals.

Impact on nutrition
The introduction of refrigeration allowed for the hygienic handling and storage of perishables, and as such, promoted output growth, consumption, and the availability of nutrition. The change in our method of food preservation moved us away from salts to a more manageable sodium level. The ability to move and store perishables such as meat and dairy led to a 1.7% increase in dairy consumption and overall protein intake by 1.25% annually in the US after the 1890s.

People were not only consuming these perishables because it became easier for they themselves to store them, but because the innovations in refrigerated transportation and storage led to less spoilage and waste, thereby driving the prices of these products down. Refrigeration accounts for at least 5.1% of the increase in adult stature (in the US) through improved nutrition, and when the indirect effects associated with improvements in the quality of nutrients and the reduction in illness is additionally factored in, the overall impact becomes considerably larger. Recent studies have also shown a negative relationship between the number of refrigerators in a household and the rate of gastric cancer mortality.

Current applications of refrigeration
Probably the most widely used current applications of refrigeration are for air conditioning of private homes and public buildings, and refrigerating foodstuffs in homes, restaurants and large storage warehouses. The use of refrigerators and walk-in coolers and freezers in kitchens, factories and warehouses    for storing and processing fruits and vegetables has allowed adding fresh salads to the modern diet year round, and storing fish and meats safely for long periods. The optimum temperature range for perishable food storage is 3 to 5 C.

In commerce and manufacturing, there are many uses for refrigeration. Refrigeration is used to liquefy gases – oxygen, nitrogen, propane, and methane, for example. In compressed air purification, it is used to condense water vapor from compressed air to reduce its moisture content. In oil refineries, chemical plants, and petrochemical plants, refrigeration is used to maintain certain processes at their needed low temperatures (for example, in alkylation of butenes and butane to produce a high-octane gasoline component). Metal workers use refrigeration to temper steel and cutlery. When transporting temperature-sensitive foodstuffs and other materials by trucks, trains, airplanes and seagoing vessels, refrigeration is a necessity.

Dairy products are constantly in need of refrigeration, and it was only discovered in the past few decades that eggs needed to be refrigerated during shipment rather than waiting to be refrigerated after arrival at the grocery store. Meats, poultry and fish all must be kept in climate-controlled environments before being sold. Refrigeration also helps keep fruits and vegetables edible longer.

One of the most influential uses of refrigeration was in the development of the sushi/sashimi industry in Japan. Before the discovery of refrigeration, many sushi connoisseurs were at risk of contracting diseases. The dangers of unrefrigerated sashimi were not brought to light for decades due to the lack of research and healthcare distribution across rural Japan. Around mid-century, the Zojirushi corporation, based in Kyoto, made breakthroughs in refrigerator designs, making refrigerators cheaper and more accessible for restaurant proprietors and the general public.

Methods of refrigeration
Methods of refrigeration can be classified as non-cyclic, cyclic, thermoelectric and magnetic.

Non-cyclic refrigeration
This refrigeration method cools a contained area by melting ice, or by sublimating dry ice. Perhaps the simplest example of this is a portable cooler, where items are put in it, then ice is poured over the top. Regular ice can maintain temperatures near, but not below the freezing point, unless salt is used to cool the ice down further (as in a traditional ice-cream maker). Dry ice can reliably bring the temperature well below water freezing point.

Cyclic refrigeration
This consists of a refrigeration cycle, where heat is removed from a low-temperature space or source and rejected to a high-temperature sink with the help of external work, and its inverse, the thermodynamic power cycle. In the power cycle, heat is supplied from a high-temperature source to the engine, part of the heat being used to produce work and the rest being rejected to a low-temperature sink. This satisfies the second law of thermodynamics.

A refrigeration cycle describes the changes that take place in the refrigerant as it alternately absorbs and rejects heat as it circulates through a refrigerator. It is also applied to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning HVACR work, when describing the "process" of refrigerant flow through an HVACR unit, whether it is a packaged or split system.

Heat naturally flows from hot to cold. Work is applied to cool a living space or storage volume by pumping heat from a lower temperature heat source into a higher temperature heat sink. Insulation is used to reduce the work and energy needed to achieve and maintain a lower temperature in the cooled space. The operating principle of the refrigeration cycle was described mathematically by Sadi Carnot in 1824 as a heat engine.

The most common types of refrigeration systems use the reverse-Rankine vapor-compression refrigeration cycle, although absorption heat pumps are used in a minority of applications.

Cyclic refrigeration can be classified as:
 * 1) Vapor cycle, and
 * 2) Gas cycle

Vapor cycle refrigeration can further be classified as:
 * 1) Vapor-compression refrigeration
 * 2) Sorption Refrigeration
 * 3) Vapor-absorption refrigeration
 * 4) Adsorption refrigeration

Vapor-compression cycle
The vapor-compression cycle is used in most household refrigerators as well as in many large commercial and industrial refrigeration systems. Figure 1 provides a schematic diagram of the components of a typical vapor-compression refrigeration system.

The thermodynamics of the cycle can be analyzed on a diagram as shown in Figure 2. In this cycle, a circulating refrigerant such as a low boiling hydrocarbon or hydrofluorocarbons enters the compressor as a vapour. From point 1 to point 2, the vapor is compressed at constant entropy and exits the compressor as a vapor at a higher temperature, but still below the vapor pressure at that temperature. From point 2 to point 3 and on to point 4, the vapor travels through the condenser which cools the vapour until it starts condensing, and then condenses the vapor into a liquid by removing additional heat at constant pressure and temperature. Between points 4 and 5, the liquid refrigerant goes through the expansion valve (also called a throttle valve) where its pressure abruptly decreases, causing flash evaporation and auto-refrigeration of, typically, less than half of the liquid.

That results in a mixture of liquid and vapour at a lower temperature and pressure as shown at point 5. The cold liquid-vapor mixture then travels through the evaporator coil or tubes and is completely vaporized by cooling the warm air (from the space being refrigerated) being blown by a fan across the evaporator coil or tubes. The resulting refrigerant vapour returns to the compressor inlet at point 1 to complete the thermodynamic cycle.

The above discussion is based on the ideal vapour-compression refrigeration cycle, and does not take into account real-world effects like frictional pressure drop in the system, slight thermodynamic irreversibility during the compression of the refrigerant vapor, or non-ideal gas behavior, if any. Vapor compression refrigerators can be arranged in two stages in cascade refrigeration systems, with the second stage cooling the condenser of the first stage. This can be used for achieving very low temperatures.

More information about the design and performance of vapor-compression refrigeration systems is available in the classic Perry's Chemical Engineers' Handbook.

Absorption cycle
In the early years of the twentieth century, the vapor absorption cycle using water-ammonia systems or LiBr-water was popular and widely used. After the development of the vapor compression cycle, the vapor absorption cycle lost much of its importance because of its low coefficient of performance (about one fifth of that of the vapor compression cycle). Today, the vapor absorption cycle is used mainly where fuel for heating is available but electricity is not, such as in recreational vehicles that carry LP gas. It is also used in industrial environments where plentiful waste heat overcomes its inefficiency.

The absorption cycle is similar to the compression cycle, except for the method of raising the pressure of the refrigerant vapor. In the absorption system, the compressor is replaced by an absorber which dissolves the refrigerant in a suitable liquid, a liquid pump which raises the pressure and a generator which, on heat addition, drives off the refrigerant vapor from the high-pressure liquid. Some work is needed by the liquid pump but, for a given quantity of refrigerant, it is much smaller than needed by the compressor in the vapor compression cycle. In an absorption refrigerator, a suitable combination of refrigerant and absorbent is used. The most common combinations are ammonia (refrigerant) with water (absorbent), and water (refrigerant) with lithium bromide (absorbent).

Adsorption cycle
The main difference with absorption cycle, is that in adsorption cycle, the refrigerant (adsorbate) could be ammonia, water, methanol, etc., while the adsorbent is a solid, such as silica gel, activated carbon, or zeolite, unlike in the absorption cycle where absorbent is liquid.

The reason adsorption refrigeration technology has been extensively researched in recent 30 years lies in that the operation of an adsorption refrigeration system is often noiseless, non-corrosive and environment friendly.

Gas cycle
When the working fluid is a gas that is compressed and expanded but does not change phase, the refrigeration cycle is called a gas cycle. Air is most often this working fluid. As there is no condensation and evaporation intended in a gas cycle, components corresponding to the condenser and evaporator in a vapor compression cycle are the hot and cold gas-to-gas heat exchangers in gas cycles.

The gas cycle is less efficient than the vapor compression cycle because the gas cycle works on the reverse Brayton cycle instead of the reverse Rankine cycle. As such, the working fluid does not receive and reject heat at constant temperature. In the gas cycle, the refrigeration effect is equal to the product of the specific heat of the gas and the rise in temperature of the gas in the low temperature side. Therefore, for the same cooling load, a gas refrigeration cycle needs a large mass flow rate and is bulky.

Because of their lower efficiency and larger bulk, air cycle coolers are not often used nowadays in terrestrial cooling devices. However, the air cycle machine is very common on gas turbine-powered jet aircraft as cooling and ventilation units, because compressed air is readily available from the engines' compressor sections. Such units also serve the purpose of pressurizing the aircraft.

Thermoelectric refrigeration
Thermoelectric cooling uses the Peltier effect to create a heat flux between the junction of two types of material. This effect is commonly used in camping and portable coolers and for cooling electronic components and small instruments. Peltier coolers are often used where a traditional vapor-compression cycle refrigerator would be impractical or take up too much space, and in cooled image sensors as an easy, compact and lightweight, if inefficient, way to achieve very low temperatures, using two or more stage peltier coolers arranged in a cascade refrigeration configuration, meaning that two or more Peltier elements are stacked on top of each other, with each stage being larger than the one before it,   in order to extract more heat and waste heat generated by the previous stages. Peltier cooling has a low COP (efficiency) when compared with that of the vapor-compression cycle, so it emits more waste heat (heat generated by the Peltier element or cooling mechanism) and consumes more power for a given cooling capacity.

Magnetic refrigeration
Magnetic refrigeration, or adiabatic demagnetization, is a cooling technology based on the magnetocaloric effect, an intrinsic property of magnetic solids. The refrigerant is often a paramagnetic salt, such as cerium magnesium nitrate. The active magnetic dipoles in this case are those of the electron shells of the paramagnetic atoms.

A strong magnetic field is applied to the refrigerant, forcing its various magnetic dipoles to align and putting these degrees of freedom of the refrigerant into a state of lowered entropy. A heat sink then absorbs the heat released by the refrigerant due to its loss of entropy. Thermal contact with the heat sink is then broken so that the system is insulated, and the magnetic field is switched off. This increases the heat capacity of the refrigerant, thus decreasing its temperature below the temperature of the heat sink.

Because few materials exhibit the needed properties at room temperature, applications have so far been limited to cryogenics and research.

Other methods
Other methods of refrigeration include the air cycle machine used in aircraft; the vortex tube used for spot cooling, when compressed air is available; and thermoacoustic refrigeration using sound waves in a pressurized gas to drive heat transfer and heat exchange; steam jet cooling popular in the early 1930s for air conditioning large buildings; thermoelastic cooling using a smart metal alloy stretching and relaxing. Many Stirling cycle heat engines can be run backwards to act as a refrigerator, and therefore these engines have a niche use in cryogenics. In addition, there are other types of cryocoolers such as Gifford-McMahon coolers, Joule-Thomson coolers, pulse-tube refrigerators and, for temperatures between 2 mK and 500 mK, dilution refrigerators.

Elastocaloric refrigeration
Another potential solid-state refrigeration technique and a relatively new area of study comes from a special property of super elastic materials. These materials undergo a temperature change when experiencing an applied mechanical stress (called the elastocaloric effect). Since super elastic materials deform reversibly at high strains, the material experiences a flattened elastic region in its stress-strain curve caused by a resulting phase transformation from an austenitic to a martensitic crystal phase.

When a super elastic material experiences a stress in the austenitic phase, it undergoes an exothermic phase transformation to the martensitic phase, which causes the material to heat up. Removing the stress reverses the process, restores the material to its austenitic phase, and absorbs heat from the surroundings cooling down the material.

The most appealing part of this research is how potentially energy efficient and environmentally friendly this cooling technology is. The different materials used, commonly shape-memory alloys, provide a non-toxic source of emission free refrigeration. The most commonly studied materials studied are shape-memory alloys, like nitinol and Cu-Zn-Al. Nitinol is of the more promising alloys with output heat at about 66 J/cm3 and a temperature change of about 16–20 K. Due to the difficulty in manufacturing some of the shape memory alloys, alternative materials like natural rubber have been studied. Even though rubber may not give off as much heat per volume (12 J/cm3 ) as the shape memory alloys, it still generates a comparable temperature change of about 12 K and operates at a suitable temperature range, low stresses, and low cost.

The main challenge however comes from potential energy losses in the form of hysteresis, often associated with this process. Since most of these losses comes from incompatibilities between the two phases, proper alloy tuning is necessary to reduce losses and increase reversibility and efficiency. Balancing the transformation strain of the material with the energy losses enables a large elastocaloric effect to occur and potentially a new alternative for refrigeration.

Fridge Gate
The Fridge Gate method is a theoretical application of using a single logic gate to drive a refrigerator in the most energy efficient way possible without violating the laws of thermodynamics. It operates on the fact that there are two energy states in which a particle can exist: the ground state and the excited state. The excited state carries a little more energy than the ground state, small enough so that the transition occurs with high probability. There are three components or particle types associated with the fridge gate. The first is on the interior of the refrigerator, the second on the outside and the third is connected to a power supply which heats up every so often that it can reach the E state and replenish the source. In the cooling step on the inside of the refrigerator, the g state particle absorbs energy from ambient particles, cooling them, and itself jumping to the e state. In the second step, on the outside of the refrigerator where the particles are also at an e state, the particle falls to the g state, releasing energy and heating the outside particles. In the third and final step, the power supply moves a particle at the e state, and when it falls to the g state it induces an energy-neutral swap where the interior e particle is replaced by a new g particle, restarting the cycle.

Passive systems
When combining a passive daytime radiative cooling system with thermal insulation and evaporative cooling, one study found a 300% increase in ambient cooling power when compared to a stand-alone radiative cooling surface, which could extend the shelf life of food by 40% in humid climates and 200% in desert climates without refrigeration. The system's evaporative cooling layer would require water "re-charges" every 10 days to a month in humid areas and every 4 days in hot and dry areas.

Capacity ratings
The refrigeration capacity of a refrigeration system is the product of the evaporators' enthalpy rise and the evaporators' mass flow rate. The measured capacity of refrigeration is often dimensioned in the unit of kW or BTU/h. Domestic and commercial refrigerators may be rated in kJ/s, or Btu/h of cooling. For commercial and industrial refrigeration systems, the kilowatt (kW) is the basic unit of refrigeration, except in North America, where both ton of refrigeration and BTU/h are used.

A refrigeration system's coefficient of performance (CoP) is very important in determining a system's overall efficiency. It is defined as refrigeration capacity in kW divided by the energy input in kW. While CoP is a very simple measure of performance, it is typically not used for industrial refrigeration in North America. Owners and manufacturers of these systems typically use performance factor (PF). A system's PF is defined as a system's energy input in horsepower divided by its refrigeration capacity in TR. Both CoP and PF can be applied to either the entire system or to system components. For example, an individual compressor can be rated by comparing the energy needed to run the compressor versus the expected refrigeration capacity based on inlet volume flow rate. It is important to note that both CoP and PF for a refrigeration system are only defined at specific operating conditions, including temperatures and thermal loads. Moving away from the specified operating conditions can dramatically change a system's performance.

Air conditioning systems used in residential application typically use SEER (Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio)for the energy performance rating. Air conditioning systems for commercial application often use EER (Energy Efficiency Ratio) and IEER (Integrated Energy Efficiency Ratio) for the energy efficiency performance rating.

title: Refrigeration


text:
Talk:Sorting Hat

Considering that the students' names are already in alphabetical order, can it truly be said that the Sorting Hat is doing any sorting at all?

Maybe it's more like calculating a hash value. . . User:Ed Poor

Sorting obviously means sorting people into houses. Sorting people into alphabetical order wouldn't really affect future events -Adrian Hobbs.

Somebody please reword the following:

" to do: why didn't it assign Harry to Slytherin? [because Harry was saying to himself 'not Slytherin! Not Slytherin!' and the Hat respected his wishes... plus the Hat could see his deeper motives and knew that he lacked the Slytherin 'sneakiness' gene.]

Also because, as Dumbledore says at the end, and probably the theme of the whole 1st book, it is one's choices which determine one's fate. Harry was put into G. because that is what he chose. "

Ilyanep 20:46 22 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I moved this from the page

" as i recall, the archchancellor's hat was big and elaborate with lots of compartments, dozens of fishing flies, and a screw-off cap containing a bottle of liquor - but it wasn't magically animated or articulate, so it wasn't THAT similar"

Ilyanep 01:07 26 Jun 2003 (UTC)

 * Perhaps we should remove said hat (of which I know nothing) until someone can actually NAME a similarity? There is none in that description of it. -- Someone else 01:23 26 Jun 2003 (UTC)

 * Yeah. Ilyanep 01:19 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)

 * OK, now it's here, ready to be moved back if anyone actually names a similarity! "

There are similarilities to the Archchancellor's Hat in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series." -- Someone else 01:02 2 Jul 2003 (UTC)

title: Talk:Sorting Hat


text:
Talk:Refrigeration

Definition
While "refrigeration" can easily be defined in relation with the generic term "cooling", the current definition implies that natural cooling is also included, which is not correct. Hence, I would propose a simpler definition, as follows:

'Cooling means removal of heat from an object or system, which results in lowering its temperature or in phase change. Artificial cooling down to temperatures lower than the ambient one (which spends human generated or harvested energy) is called refrigeration.'

Please focus on the suggestion and do not argue with my anonymous IP! I am an expert in the area and play a role in many refrigeration-related organizations around the world. :) --212.73.146.73 (talk) 09:25, 15 June 2016 (UTC)

REFRIGERATION
At what temperature does a frige become a freezer? (unsigned)
 * At a temperature that allows you to operate a computer, press Backspace and type the letters "r" "e" "e" "z" "e" "r". Micasta (talk) 14:51, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Micasta, that was a cruel and pointless comment. I don't think you made anyone laugh but yourself. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.107.181.33 (talk) 10:09, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

The two dead links in the ICE HARVESTING can be rectified. I found a few related links. User:Naninnewetuah 8-15-2011 —Preceding undated comment added 06:24, 15 August 2011 (UTC).

Refrigeration
Perhaps some clean up of the first line "Refrigeration is the process of removing heat from an enclosed space, or from a substance, and moving it to a place where it is unobjectionable."

That the space is enclosed does not cause the effect to be refrigeration, it could be anywhere. The place to which the heat is moved is not a determinate either. Consider a cascaded refrigeration system, the condenser of the first system is part of a liquid to liquid heat exchanger that is the evaporator of the second system.

Suggestion, Refrigeration is the process of removing heat from a localized area. SteveOak25 (talk) 21:20, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Sentences should focus on refrigeration
This came from the "First refrigeration systems" section:

 * Meanwhile, James Harrison who was born in Scotland and subsequently emigrated to Australia, began operation of a mechanical ice-making machine in 1851 on the banks of the Barwon River at Rocky Point in Geelong, Victoria.

If I were doing a research on refrigeration, I wouldn't care if James Harrison were Scottish, Australian or Martian. I would be interested in what he contributed to the technology of refrigeration... and in the event that I become more interested in who James Harrison was, I'd just check out his article (there's a link to that). The phrase "who was born in Scotland and subsequently emigrated to Australia" distracts the reader from the subject of refrigeration. I've decided to re-word the sentence to "James Harrison from Scotland began operation of a mechanical ice-making machine in 1851..." His emigration to Australia need not be highlighted. Micasta (talk) 14:44, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Warehouses
We have pages on refrigerated/reefer ships and containers, but nothing on cold storage/refrigerated warehouses. Could someone either link a page, add a section here or create an article??71.236.26.74 (talk) 22:00, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Pretty Weak
This whole article is pretty weak, technically deficient, and it reads like an introduction to commercial refrigeration in the U.S.A.

189.188.166.197 (talk) 05:44, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Units of Refrigeration
The section of called "Units of Refrigeration" has some good historical information in it. However, it is largely incorrect for the current industry. 1 Ton of Refrigeration (TR) is defined as precisely 12,000 BTU/hr. Secondly as this unit is defined in English Units, and is really only used where English units are used. It is rather nonsensical to have multiple SI equivalents, especially seeing as most of the rest of the World uses the Kw as the standard unit of refrigeration. I would recommend a rewording as follows.

''The units of refrigeration are always a unit of power. Domestic and commercial refrigerators may be rated in kJ/s, or Btu/h of cooling. For commercial and industrial refrigeration systems most of the world uses the kilowatt (kW) as the basic unit refrigeration. Typically, commercial and industrial refrigeration systems North America are rated in Tons of Refrigeration (TR). Historically, one Ton of Refrigeration was defined as the energy removal rate that will freeze one short ton of water at 0 °C (32 °F) in one day. This was very important because many early refrigeration systems were in ice houses. The simple unit allowed owners of these refrigeration systems measure a days output of ice against energy consumption and compare their plant to one down the street. While ice houses make up a much smaller part of the refrigeration industry than they once did the unit of Tons of Refrigeration has remained in North America. The unit's value as historically defined is approximately 11,958 BTU/hr (3.505 kW) has been redefined to be exactly 12,000 BTU/hr (3.517 kW).''

''While not truly a unit, a refrigeration system's Coefficient of Performance (CoP) is very important in determining a system's overall efficiency. It is defined as refrigeration capacity in kW divided by the energy input in kW. While CoP is a very simple measure, like the kW, it is typically not used for industrial refrigeration in North America. Owners and manufacturers of these systems typically use Performance Factor. A systems Performance Factor is defined as a system's energy input in horsepower divided by it's refrigeration capacity in Tons of Refrigeration. Both Coefficient of Performance and Performance Factor can be applied to either the entire system or to system components. For example an individual compressor can be rated by looking at the energy required to run the compressor versus the the expected refrigeration capacity based on inlet volume flow rate. It is important to note that both Coefficient of Performance and Performance Factor for a refrigeration system are only defined at a specific operating conditions. Moving away from those operating conditions can dramatically change a system's performance.''

Please provide feedback on this post. I plan to change the "Units of Refrigeration" section to this sometime after 10/18/2010 if no one has any objections. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.36.95.12 (talk) 14:21, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

As no one has commented on this post I am changing the section in question be be what is written here. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.36.95.12 (talk) 19:50, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Refridgeration in history
Many old emperors had ice house: ie Zimri-Lin, Yongsheng Shensi, Tj'n Sje Hwang-ti, ... The "ice house" built at Yongsheng, in Shensi had a lock-mechanism and was situated near a river. I'm wondering whether none of these used a system similar to the Pot-in-pot_refrigerator, that would also be a very important thing to mention then.

91.182.251.170 (talk) 14:26, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

As far as I know many large houses in the country in Britain had and "ice house". They were usually made as a smallish building over a cellar. The cellars were insulated for the best effect. Ice was harvested from any local source and stored in these cellars for use when cooling was needed. 2.102.129.125 (talk) 15:22, 26 December 2013 (UTC)Luke Wiseman

Introduction
Removing the third sentence as it is a slightly more technical and largely more ambiguous restatement of the first. Additionally the "this" does not refer to anything specific. Moving the last sentence to be the second sentence.

Original

Refrigeration is a process in which work is done to remove heat from one location to another. Refrigeration has many applications including but not limited to; household refrigerators, industrial freezers, cryogenics, air conditioning, and heat pumps. In order to satisfy the Second Law of Thermodynamics, some form of work must be performed to accomplish this. The work is traditionally done by mechanical work but can also be done by magnetism, laser or other means.

New

Refrigeration is a process in which work is done to remove heat from one location to another. This work is traditionally done by mechanical work but can also be done by magnetism, laser or other means. Refrigeration has many applications including but not limited to; household refrigerators, industrial freezers, cryogenics, air conditioning, and heat pumps.

food storage optimum temperature
"Optimum temperature range for perishable food storage is 3 to 5 °C (37 to 41 °F)."

It seems that for most food the ideal optimum storage temperature would be just above freezing, about 1C, 33F. Is this true? Where can one find detailed facts, tables and graphs of storage time as a function of temperature for various foods? What temperatures are used for ideal commercial storage of various foods?-96.237.13.111 (talk) 14:33, 19 November 2011 (UTC)

William Cullen
The WikiPedia article states Cullen made the first public display of refrigeration in 1756, but many other sources state this event happened in 1748. Some fact checking may be in order. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 180.68.43.188 (talk) 14:03, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Should we propose merger with Ton_of_refrigeration?
It appears that this article's section Refrigeration has a more extensive discussion of the history of Ton_of_refrigeration. Should that page be merged into this page, or should that information be merged into Ton_of_refrigeration page, and here provide a "see main article" link?

There are benefits of maintaining a unique page for Ton_of_refrigeration.
 * Search engine hits lead directly to pertinent info
 * The unit belongs to the broader category of heat transfer, not refrigeration alone

Any thoughts? Nfette (talk) 23:37, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

non-cyclic refrigeration
Since the "non-cyclic refrigeration" section was empty, I took the liberty of putting some basic information in there. Hopefully someone with more knowledge on the subject will expand it if there is more to the topic. - Marcus erronius (talk) 21:11, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Merge concepts of "air conditioning" and "refrigeration"? Comments requested
Please see I think that descriptions of "air cooling" are all the same concept but somehow started to be described in multiples places. I am seeking advice on what can be merged together and where.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  16:23, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Comments requested on merging "air cooling" process descriptions from multiple Wikipedia articles

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Grotesque
One of the most grotesquely overdetailed and discursive articles I've ever encountered. If I weren't phone-bound for another week I'd take a hatchet to it. EEng 21:19, 14 May 2018 (UTC)
 * This are a lot "cooler", you know. Martinevans123 (talk) 15:18, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 27 July 2018
Suggest add Institute of Refrigeration to external links section as show below:
 * Yes check.svg Done L293D (☎ • ✎) 18:55, 28 July 2018 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 25 November 2018
Change: From point 1 to point 2, the vapor is compressed at constant entropy and exits the compressor as a vapor at a higher temperature, but still below the vapor pressure at that temperature. to: From point 1 to point 2, the vapor is compressed through an isentropic compression process and exits the compressor as a higher temperature vapor, but still below the vapor pressure at that temperature. Lab95 (talk) 22:11, 25 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: You've made the text less concise but said the exact same thing. Why? Izno (talk) 23:19, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

Suggested Correction to Article
I suggest, based on personal knowledge and, well, science, that the following statement in the main article is not completely correct in all normal use cases:

"Non-cyclic refrigeration ...Regular ice can maintain temperatures near, but not below the freezing point....".

I will add that the cited assertion/claim cites no supporting reference material. I will also add that "regular ice" should just be "ice" or - to set it off from the item it is to be contrasted with - "water ice"; and that "dry ice" be a link to that article or at least be described: "dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide)" or similar.

At the risk of offering "original research" (or just settled science), I posit: water under normal pressures freezes at a temperature. Below that temperature, perhaps even down to near absolute zero, it remains frozen; and anything packed in it will transfer energy to it and cool until the system (volume of material within the containment) reaches a (dynamic) temperature equilibrium; so if the ratio of masses between very cold ice and a packed item that was at "room temperature and air pressure" is large enough (if there is enough ice) and the ice is cold enough, it will freeze the water portion of the item that was packed in it. 170.63.67.40 (talk) 15:13, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Any serious discussion on refrigeration history should mention the Einstein–Szilard refrigerator
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator

I am not tech savvy enough to do any editing... 69.172.158.166 (talk) 20:57, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

"VAHP" listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect VAHP and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. Steel1943 (talk) 05:56, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Mobile refrigeration
I suspect this article displaces other possibilities that might have been more helpful. Really quite a shame. -SusanLesch (talk) 15:14, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Artificial and natural refrigerator
new section 43.225.23.30 (talk) 17:58, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:Refrigeration