History of refrigerators: From western imports to modern smart refrigerators

The tale of Marco Polo returning to Italy from the East with a sweet sherbet recipe that would eventually evolve into the modern ‘Ice Cream’ is rather well known, despite experts questioning whether Polo’s recipe was actually the true origins of ice cream. But, how much do we know about the freezers that store this cold delight that’s enjoyed across the globe? Probably not enough.

Today, cold storage makes for the foundation of many industries, including pharmaceuticals, research, horticulture, and yes, the dairy sector too. And yet, it seems nobody knows where refrigerators actually came from. Ahead of India’s 77th year of independence, here’s a brief history on refrigeration in the country, and the journey to the modern home fridge.

Ancient and medieval refrigeration

Unlike the history of televisions and other appliances, refrigeration has its roots all the way back in ancient civilisations, when people used naturally available resources like cold water and snow to store food for longer. A common technique included pits filled with snow or ice, covered with a layer of insulation via materials like straw or sawdust.

Centuries later, when electricity was yet to be brought to homes, people still used ice and snow in shelters near lakes and rivers to keep food cool, but in areas where temperatures were not so chilly, people would also often resort to underwater and underground storage like cold cellars. The use of personal ice-boxes (boxes of ice lined with sawdust of seaweed insulation) also grew popular.

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These home-made ice-boxes would then go on to inspire manufactured iceboxes in the 1800s, which can be considered the first major step towards modern refrigerators. These iceboxes often used insulated metal, and featured a compartment for holding a large block of ice, which would serve as the source of cooling. Households with these iceboxes would often get replacement ice blocks regularly for keeping things cool in the rest of the icebox.

The early refrigerators

Scottish professor Willian Cullen is credited with observing the cooling effect of rapid evaporation in 1748. But, it wasn’t until the 1800s when this principle would turn into inventions. The first vapour compression system was created in 1834 by American Jacob Perkins, while the first process for liquefying gasses was patented by German professor Carl von Linde across the Atlantic around the same time.

However, it would still be nearly a century later, when the first refrigerators came into existence. This included the first electric home refrigerator by American Fred W. Wolf in 1913, and the first home refrigerator with a built-in compressor, introduced by William C. Durant five years later in 1918. Costing between $6,500 to $13,150 in today’s equivalents, these refrigerators would be a luxury for many in the west until the late 1920s and the 1930s.

New designs and features

Refrigerators also started improving on the technology front during the mid-1900s, and features like automatic ice-makers and automatic defrosting being introduced. The iconic boxy design of the refrigerator also started to take shape, with multiple doors separating the refrigerator which could store food and drinks, and the freezer, which could make ice or freeze other consumables.

Between the 1940s and the 1990s, the refrigerator also started taking new shapes. The standard two-door layout took a horizontal turn to store more food in the 1940s, setting the path for modern side-by-side doors. Meanwhile, the iconic French Door refrigerator was introduced in the 1990s, and allowed users to not only store more consumables, but also glance at the entire inventory at once.

In 1954, the first self-defrosting refrigerators were also invented, which could get rid of any unwanted ice build-up with little to no human intervention. Other variations like the bottom-freezer refrigerator also arose during this same time, as brands continued to experiment with new designs. However, the iconic rectangular two-door would continue to become the poster boy for refrigerators and would also be the most commonly adopted design in countries like India which were slowly adopting the appliance.

Welcoming refrigerators to India

Despite the growing popularity of the refrigerators in the west as civilisation recovered from the first World War and headed towards the second, the technology didn’t immediately come to India, a country still under British rule. One of the many reasons was the lack of widespread electricity in the country, an essential requirement for the functioning of these refrigerators.

In the rest of the world, however, refrigerators continued to grow in popularity, and gradually started being called ‘fridges’, a slang named after American company Frigidaire which along with Kelvinator, became a common name in the American refrigerator market.

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While the first refrigerators began being imported in India from 1928 and were targeted at those from the west who had settled in the country, it wasn’t until the late 1950s that the technology caught momentum. A little over a decade after India became an independent country, Godrej and Boyce introduced the first Indian refrigerator in 1958.

However, despite Indian refrigerators in the market along with many imported options, refrigerator adoption in India seemed handicapped, and brands started digging deeper only to find a different kind of challenge.

Overcoming challenges to mainstream adoption of refrigerators

Apart from household electricity connections, which were yet to reach many areas of the country, refrigerators were still looked at as a way to cook unhealthy food. A paper by Professor Harold Wilhite, Social Anthropology, University of Oslo’s Centre for Development and Environment suggests that Indians had a different food ideology – one in which refrigerators didn’t sit well. As cooking and eating fresh food was part of the culture in many Indian households, including well-off ones, refrigeration, and storing and reheating of food were considered bad practices.

Due to these issues, refrigeration and refrigerators would only start being adopted on a larger scale in the early 2000s. This was due to many reasons. For starters, refrigerators were removed from the category of luxury goods in 1991 and hence, lower taxes meant many more families could now afford refrigerators.

Additionally, more women started entering the Indian workforce, and in younger families where no one person was assigned household duties like cooking and storage anymore, the need for quick cooking and storage solutions was quickly recognised. The refrigerator became not just a solution to these problems, but also one that families could now afford.

Smart refrigerators and present-day features

Around the same time India started adopting refrigerators, the idea of connecting the refrigerator to the internet, enabling new and exciting features and remote control became a growing theme. LG would announce the first ‘Internet Refrigerator’ in the year 2000, but its large price-tag (over $20,000) didn’t help attract more eyes to the technology.

However, references in popular culture would keep the idea alive. A scene in 2000’s ‘The 6th Day’, for instance, would see Arnold Schwarzenegger use an internet refrigerator that would inform the protagonist of expired milk. Instead, both consumers and brands would focus on making these appliances more feature-rich and less power hungry in the years to come.

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Over two decades later, with the internet itself having evolved enough to make technological concepts like IoT (Internet of Things) a reality, smart refrigerators are much more useful. Apart from opening the seemingly infinite use cases that internet connectivity usually can, smart refrigerators now feature displays as well as see-through doors that help you check the fridge without opening the door. However, these refrigerators continued to remain expensive. Other features like built-in water and ice dispensers or reversible doors also remain less popular among the masses.

What most people probably use in India today, is the iconic two-door, which can now be purchased in multiple sizes, as well as with advanced features like convertible compartments, that let you convert select compartments from refrigerator to freezer, or vice versa, depending on your needs. The modern refrigerator also comes with multiple handy features like see-through glass shelves and alarms that make sure that the only open door, is the one that looks at future innovation.