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Ammonia was used in early home refrigerators, and people died in their sleep from exposure to leaked refrigerant with distressing frequency. There was a race to
by blacksqr 3y ago
Ammonia was used in early home refrigerators, and people died in their sleep from exposure to leaked refrigerant with distressing frequency. There was a race to design leak-proof refrigerators; Einstein was issued a patent.
Then non-toxic freon was introduced and rendered those efforts irrelevant.
- kragen 3y agoi think it was sulfur dioxide that was the culprit in those deaths, and the einstein-szilard refrigerator was also an ammonia-absorption refrigerator, though it didn't have leak-prone moving seals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator ammonia-absorption refrigerators of more or less the einstein-szilard type still aren't leak-proof, even without moving seals as you will easily learn if you go to a junkyard to find spare parts for one (they're still popular in rvs, and i stayed in a hotel room earlier this year that had one, manufactured within the last decade) freon was a huge safety improvement over early vapor-compression refrigerants like propane and sulfur dioxide, but ammonia-absorption refrigerators are a different beast entirely