©2026 This excerpt taken from the article of the same name which appeared in ASHRAE Journal, vol. 68, No. 1, January 2026.
The Coming of Age of the Domestic Refrigerator
By Andy Pearson
Andy Pearson, Ph.D., C.Eng., is group managing director at Star Refrigeration in Glasgow, Scotland
It is easy to identify a date to celebrate the birth, key achievement or even death of a famous figure in the refrigeration and air-conditioning field. Finding a suitable occasion to mark the development of an entire industry is much more difficult because it is the result of years, if not decades, of development spread over many specialist areas and across continents that leads to that sort of success. This is the case for the domestic refrigerator, which has taken more than two centuries to become the sort of mass-market commodity that is found in our kitchens today.
This article celebrates the 100th anniversary of one key step along that journey. It looks at the domestic refrigerator as it was in October 1925 from the viewpoint of contemporary knowledge and seeks to emphasize how remarkable that development was at that time.
The first use of the word “refrigerator” is credited to a Maryland farmer, Thomas Moore, who lived in Brookeville and churned butter, which he took on horseback to market in Georgetown in Washington, D.C.—a journey of about 20 miles (32 kilometers). Thomas designed and built what would now be called a “cool box using a phase-change material.” The phase-change material was ice, packed around the pan that contained the butter, enabling the produce to be delivered to market in such good condition that he could charge ¢5/lb (¢11/kg) more than the regular rate.
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