My New Refrigerator

[swinggal]

The rotating shelves are an excellent idea!! Bring those back fringemakers!! Modern kitchens have them in corner spaces, but in a fridge - so very useful!!

 

[Shangas]

It seems to me, at least, that "Frigidaire", in the United States, at least, has attained a sort of genericised trademark level.

For example - Esky (coldbox), Band-Aid (pre-prepared bandage), Jello (gelatine) and so-forth. To the same way of thinking, it's now a frigidaire, not a 'fridge' or a 'refrigerator'. I don't necessarily think it has anything to do with generational, geographical or socio-economic factors.

It's just habit.

 

[tonyb]

It seems to me, at least, that "Frigidaire", in the United States, at least, has attained a sort of genericised trademark level.

For example - Esky (coldbox), Band-Aid (pre-prepared bandage), Jello (gelatine) and so-forth. To the same way of thinking, it's now a frigidaire, not a 'fridge' or a 'refrigerator'. I don't necessarily think it has anything to do with generational, geographical or socio-economic factors.

It's just habit.

Well, my wholly anecdotal observation is that the use of "Frigidaire" as a generic term for refrigerator is indeed a generational and quite likely regional phenomenon. I just don't ever hear younger people say it, and rarely do I hear older people out here in the Maritime Pacific Northwest say it. It's a "fridge," to most people these days.

Band-Aid and Jello, though, cross generational and regional lines.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Big refrigeration plants for making artificial ice date back to the 1850s. Home refrigerators were made in the 1920s or possibly earlier, but were usually seen in the homes of the wealthy or in hotels, restaurants etc.

One problem was the toxic gases they used like ammonia and sulfur dioxide. Refrigerators were usually kept on the back porch so they couldn't gas the kitchen staff to death if they sprung a leak. Several people were killed by home refrigerators in the 1920s.

The solution to this problem came with the invention of Freon by General Motors researcher Thomas Midgely. Mass production of Freon began in 1930 and by 1935 it was in use in 8 million refrigerators in the US.

Ice boxes held out through the depression and WW2 but by the 1950s they were a thing of the past except for camping trailers and rural families without electricity.

In 1932, the Carrier Engineering Corporation used Freon in the world's first self-contained home air conditioning unit, called an "Atmospheric Cabinet".

By the way Thomas Midgely also invented leaded gasoline. So he has a lot to answer for, environmentally.

 

[dhermann1]

I sort of noodged my girlfriend into buying a nicely restored 1950 GE, (exactly like the one in the 1950 version of Father of the Bride, as I noticed the other night). She's nervous about the electricity use. This is reassuring info.
The town I grew up in Chautauqua, NY, had an ice house till the winter of 1955-56, when accumulated snow made the roof cave in. I remember people with old oak ice boxes on their back porches, and the man with the ice truck coming around.
One serious issue with the freon units is that freon use is no longer legal in the US. Fridges that use it are still perfectly legal, but you can't recharge the system, and taking the gas out, if you want to discard the unit, is a cumbersome process. They don't want ANY escaping into the atmosphere, because it does deplete the ozone layer.

 

[Stanley Doble]

There are substitutes for Freon. As long as it is in the fridge it is harmless. If it has to be removed for a repair it can be saved and put back in, or if lost a different less effective refrigerant used. Yes the new refrigerants are less effective, one reason your old fridge is more efficient.

 

[vitanola]

I've been using refrigerators with sulfur dioxide (or occasionally Methyl Formate) refrigerant for nigh on thirty years, now, with no problems, except for the one time that the housekeeper decided to use an ice pick on the evaporator. I did have to replace the machine on that one, and believe me, a refrigeration machine for a two-door Monitor Top was hard to find in 1997!

Freon may no longer be MANUFACTURED, but it MUST be reclaimed from scrapped refrigeration equipment. Purified relcaimed R-12 is indeed available to certified refrigeration technicians for maintenance and repair use. The certification test is fairly easy, and used reclamation equipment can occasionally be found pretty cheaply. A couple of years ago I took the test and have since been legally using R-12 in the repair of old refrigerators. There are no restrictions on SO2 refrigerant but I've not got around to working with it -YET.

 

[Lincsong]

Gotta wonder how much of that is generational and how much is regional. The folks on my Southern stepfather's side, those a generation or two ahead of me, were apt to call a refrigerator an "ice box." (I'm talkin' into the 1970s and '80s here, a good half century or more after the home refrigerator became a commonplace.) My upper Midwestern mother's people usually called a refrigerator a "Frigidaire," regardless of its manufacturer. Those folks also called a microwave oven, whoever made it, a "Radar Range."

As an aside ... These working-class ancestors of mine were quick to adopt these new technologies. No misty-eyed nostalgics in that bunch. I'm confident they would have been quite enthusiastic about cell phones and GPS and the other gee-whiz mobile technologies we have these days, but knowing them as I did, I suspect that early home computers would have left them cold. "Just too darned complicated and confusing," I can almost hear them say.

My maternal Grandmother also referred to the couch as "sofa" while my Dad's Aunt, who grew up with her, also said "refrigidaire" or "ice box". She would also refer to the living room of the house as "the parlor" and the front porch as "the veranda".

My Grandmother's house was built in 1922 and in the kitchen there was a pantry though not walk-in, I don't know how else to describe it, but it was in the outer wall of the house. The shelves were slatted wood and there were two screened openings on the outer wall. I'm assuming this was before electric residential refrigerators were common and items were kept here to keep cool.

 

[tonyb]

... My Grandmother's house was built in 1922 and in the kitchen there was a pantry though not walk-in, I don't know how else to describe it, but it was in the outer wall of the house. The shelves were slatted wood and there were two screened openings on the outer wall. I'm assuming this was before electric residential refrigerators were common and items were kept here to keep cool.

Those little ventilated food storage spaces (with screens over the openings to keep the critters out) were fairly common, although I'm guessing that a sizable percentage of them have been closed up in the decades since refrigerators became common. The house of a friend (a fellow who succumbed to brain cancer a couple of weeks ago, alas) has such a compartment still. The place was built in the 1910s or early '20s, I'd guess by looking at at.

 

[Shangas]

It sounds like a larder.

There's a difference between the two.

The pantry is where you store drygoods. Bread, flour and so forth (from the Latin 'Pannus' - Bread).

The larder is where you stored stuff that had to be kept cool. Meat. Butter. Cream. Milk. Leftover food from last night's dinner etc.

 

[tonyb]

It sounds like a larder.

There's a difference between the two.

The pantry is where you store drygoods. Bread, flour and so forth (from the Latin 'Pannus' - Bread).

The larder is where you stored stuff that had to be kept cool. Meat. Butter. Cream. Milk. Leftover food from last night's dinner etc.

Or maybe even lard (from Old French lardier, from medieval Latin lardarium, from laridum [see LARD], according to the dictionary program that came with my Mac, not to get too darned pedantic about it).

 

[Lincsong]

It sounds like a larder.

There's a difference between the two.

The pantry is where you store drygoods. Bread, flour and so forth (from the Latin 'Pannus' - Bread).

The larder is where you stored stuff that had to be kept cool. Meat. Butter. Cream. Milk. Leftover food from last night's dinner etc.

Thanks for the clarification. I had no idea. Well, when my mother sold the house in 2007 the new owner gutted the inside of the house, save for the remodeled bathroom. He yanked all the lathe and plaster so he could get to the studs and install more electrical outlets, pulled the built-in cabinets and removed the walls between the kitchen and dining room, and the kitchen and laundry room. The "larder" is now lost to history.

My Dad told me how in the late 1920's and 1930's his mother would store meat in lard when they didn't have a refridgerator. So yeah, "larder" could also mean a place to store lard covered meat.

 

[vitanola]

Your home had what was known to the building trade as a "California Cooler". These did not entirely obviate the need for an ice box, and hence the need for ice, but they were excellent places to store produce the year 'round, and meat and dairy could be stored in them during the cool months.

 

[tonyb]

Your home had what was known to the building trade as a "California Cooler". These did not entirely obviate the need for an ice box, and hence the need for ice, but they were excellent places to store produce the year 'round, and meat and dairy could be stored in them during the cool months.

Interesting, that. I don't know that these things didn't exist in the Wisconsin of my youth, but I have no recollection of seeing them there. But out here in the Maritime Northwest, where winters aren't nearly so severe, a person still comes across them in older (by local standards) homes. Perhaps in places such as Wisconsin, where it isn't all that unusual for outside temperatures to dip below zero degrees Fahrenheit, a screened opening in a wall with nothing but a thin cabinet door between it and the living space wouldn't be such a good idea.

 

[tonyb]

The wonderfulness of the Web ...

http://www.instructables.com/id/Resurrecting-the-California-Cooler/

 

[Lincsong]

The wonderfulness of the Web ...

http://www.instructables.com/id/Resurrecting-the-California-Cooler/

Interesting blog here. The California Cooler in my Grandmother's house was actually a large cabinet that had a seven foot tall door.

 

[dhermann1]

New York City apartment buildings of the same era have similar features. It will be a cubby hole in the lower part of the exterior kitchen wall, lined with metal, and with a metal door. Nobody uses them any more of course, but they still exist. I had one in a place I lived in in the early 80's. Wish I had a picture of it.