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Encyclopedia entry: Refrigeration and Air Conditioning
- Article from:
- The Oxford Companion to United States History
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Copyright© The Oxford Companion to United States History 2001, originally published by Oxford University Press 2001. (Hide copyright information)
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Refrigeration and Air Conditioning.
The development after 1850 of machines to control the temperature and moisture content of air profoundly affected the way Americans lived and worked. Although refrigeration and air conditioning are historically and technologically entwined, their purposes differ. Refrigeration preserves food and other perishables; air conditioning—a term coined in 1906 by textile engineer Stuart Cramer—controls temperature and humidity in spaces generally occupied by human beings.
Refrigeration arose from the early nineteenth century practice of “harvesting”
New England
lake ice and shipping huge blocks, packed in sawdust, to ...