In a Scottish laboratory in 1755 C.E., a physician and chemist named William Cullen did something no one had done before: he made cold on purpose. Using a pump to create a partial vacuum over a flask of diethyl ether, he watched the liquid boil at low pressure, drawing heat out of the surrounding air. A small, fleeting crust of ice formed on the container. It was impractical, brief, and entirely useless as a product — and it quietly changed the course of human civilization.
What the evidence shows
- Artificial refrigeration: Cullen used a vacuum pump and diethyl ether to demonstrate that mechanical means could produce cooling — the first recorded experiment of its kind, documented in 1755 C.E.
- Vacuum cooling: By lowering air pressure over a volatile liquid, Cullen caused rapid evaporation that absorbed heat from the environment, producing a small but measurable drop in temperature and a thin layer of ice.
- Scientific lineage: Cullen’s work directly inspired later researchers including Benjamin Franklin, Jacob Perkins, and Michael Faraday, whose successive experiments turned the principle into a working, continuously operating refrigeration cycle by the mid-19th century C.E.
A world before mechanical cold
Before Cullen’s experiment, humans had spent thousands of years improvising against heat. The Chinese were harvesting and storing natural ice as far back as 1000 B.C.E. Persians built underground structures called yakhchāls to preserve ice through the summer. Ancient Egyptians cooled water by leaving it in shallow clay pots on rooftops overnight, letting evaporation do the work. People in India used the same evaporative principle to produce modest amounts of ice.
These were ingenious solutions. But they were all dependent on nature cooperating — on winter being cold enough, on the right geography, on the right season. What Cullen glimpsed in 1755 C.E. was something different: the possibility of cold as a human act, independent of weather or geography.
It was a philosophical shift as much as a scientific one.
From experiment to industry
The chain of influence from Cullen’s vacuum flask to the modern refrigerator runs through several generations of scientists and inventors. In 1758 C.E., Benjamin Franklin and chemist John Hadley, working at Cambridge University in England, confirmed that evaporating volatile liquids like alcohol and ether could push temperatures well below the freezing point of water — down to −14 °C in their experiment, while the room around them sat at a comfortable 18 °C.
In 1820 C.E., Michael Faraday liquefied ammonia and other gases using high pressure and low temperature. By 1834 C.E., American inventor Jacob Perkins had built the first continuously operating vapor-compression refrigeration system — the direct ancestor of every household refrigerator made today.
The commercial ice trade, which peaked in the mid-19th century C.E. with cities like New York consuming 100,000 tons of harvested ice per year, created the social appetite for cold. When mechanical refrigeration became reliable, people already understood what it was for.
Lasting impact
It is difficult to overstate how thoroughly artificial refrigeration reshaped human life. The ability to preserve food mechanically and reliably changed where people could live, what they could eat, and how food was grown and distributed. Refrigerated rail cars opened up vast inland territories to agricultural settlement. Cities like Houston and Las Vegas — places that would have been nearly uninhabitable as large urban centers without climate control — owe part of their existence to this chain of innovation.
Global food supply chains, the modern supermarket, the mass reduction of foodborne illness, the possibility of transporting vaccines and medicines across continents — all of these trace back, in part, to a Scottish physician with a pump and a flask of ether.
Farm productivity transformed alongside refrigeration. Output per person today dwarfs what was possible in the late 1800s C.E., and refrigeration is one of the structural reasons why. Populations that once could not sustain large urban concentrations now can.
The science of thermodynamics itself benefited from refrigeration research. The need to understand why evaporation cools, why compression heats, and how heat moves between systems drove foundational physics that shaped everything from steam engines to modern climate science.
Blindspots and limits
Cullen’s machine had no practical use in his own lifetime — he acknowledged as much. And the refrigeration revolution, when it did arrive at industrial scale, brought costs alongside its benefits. The refrigerants used in 20th-century systems — particularly chlorofluorocarbons — were later found to deplete the ozone layer, requiring a global treaty, the Montreal Protocol, to phase them out. The energy demands of refrigeration at global scale remain a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions today.
The benefits of refrigeration have also not reached everyone equally. Reliable cold chains are still absent in many lower-income regions, contributing to food loss, vaccine spoilage, and preventable illness — a reminder that the technology’s promise is not yet fully realized.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Refrigeration
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- An Alzheimer’s prevention drug cuts risk in half in a landmark trial
- U.K. cancer death rates fall to their lowest level on record
- The Good News for Humankind archive on science and technology
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