Refrigeration history from Norway and the world

By Jorgen Johansen

The first refrigerators in Norway resembled something between a safe and a chest of drawers, and were built of wood with a drawer at the top for ice blocks and a larger cabinet door below for food. The walls were often insulated with iron plates, so they were heavy things.

Refrigerators with compressors first became common in Norwegian homes from around 1960, before that there were communal freezers in the cities where you could rent space for food and fur coats.

Cold rooms as we know them today came into full force around 1980. It then became common to build cold rooms at home in single-family homes for large families. As time has passed, the market has changed a bit.

The average refrigerator has become somewhat smaller than it was in the 1980s. Back then, people built large refrigerators in their houses with potato bins and space for fur coats and homemade jam.

Now the cold rooms are smaller and more flexible, with a bit more varied sizes. Before, the cold rooms were +/- 8 m³, today the average is, after a "calculated guess", +/- 3 m³.

The areas of use are just as large – if not larger today – but the quantities of food have been greatly reduced. Many people use cold storage today as before for storing apples, potatoes, vegetables, honey, homemade jam, tenderizing meat during the hunting season, and wine.

The biggest change in the market within the application area in recent years is that it is soon just as common to have a cold room or a cooling corner at the cottage or summer house – this is where families gather during vacations and holidays, and then there is a great need for cold rooms.

Mechanical refrigeration for the refrigerator was invented in 1876 by German engineer Carl von Linde. The invention of mechanical refrigeration was first tested at a brewery in Munich, after which beer was no longer a seasonal item.

In 1902, the first modern air conditioning was designed for industry, but in 1925, the first air conditioning as we know it today was installed at an American cinema called the Rivoli in Times Square. The inventor was Willis Carrier. Customers flocked to it, but mostly to cool off in the summer heat – for the cinema at least, it was a very profitable summer that year.

For those who are interested, I can also mention that heat pumps are not a new invention. Thomson Kelvin presented the heat pump principle as early as 1852, and the first industrial heat pump was installed in Norway as early as 1918. This means that the heat pump came before the refrigerator.