For thousands of years, humans coped with heat by harvesting and storing natural ice and devising natural cooling systems that utilized ventilation and evaporation. By the mid 1800s, people began developing huge refrigeration machines to manufacture ice. By the early 1900s, engineers developed electric domestic refrigerators, which by 1927 were affordable convenient household appliances.
By then, an increasingly sophisticated public demanded more modern-looking appliances than engineers could produce, and a new breed of designers entered the manufacturing world to provide them. During the Depression, modern designs not only increased sales but resulted in the kitchen appliances we now use. Today refrigeration preserves perishable food for worldwide distribution, makes tropical climates habitable for millions, saves lives with medical applications and enables space flight.

Carroll Gantz is a professional industrial designer who holds several dozen patents. A long-time Black & Decker design director, and a Carnegie Mellon University professor, he is a past president of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA). He lives on Seabrook Island in South Carolina.

Carroll Gantz
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 280
Bibliographic Info: 71 photos, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2015
pISBN: 978-0-7864-7687-9
eISBN: 978-1-4766-1969-9
Imprint: McFarland

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments ix

Preface 1

Introduction 3

1 Natural Cooling and Ice 5

2 Mechanically Manufactured Ice 29

3 Electricity and Invention 57

4 Early Electric Refrigerators 80

5 Gas Refrigeration and Air Conditioners 102

6 The Rise of Fashion and the Depression 129

7 The Design Decade 153

8 Postwar Refrigeration 182

9 Regulations and Climate Change 210

10 Epilogue: Snow and Ice Redux 229

Chapter Notes 243

Bibliography 250

Index 253

“Gantz is highly knowledgeable…vividly recreates the era of the icebox”—Wall Street Journal; “readers will learn about a number of different topics…readable narrative…recommended”—Booklist.