Harrison's ice-making machine

If you find yourself in a park reading The Engineer with an ice cream in hand, you may wish to thank a Mr James Harrison of Geelong, Victoria, for making this idyllic scene possible. Harrison, a Scot who moved to Australia, was the grandfather of the refrigerator. He came from the unlikely background of publishing, working as a printing apprentice in London before moving to Sydney to set up a printing press.

It was there that he developed his idea for the first refrigerator. While cleaning movable type, he noticed that the evaporating fluid left the metal much colder.

In 1861, The Engineer reported on one of Harrison’s initial designs: ’The peculiarity of the invention consists in the arrangements for evaporating the ether at a low temperature, and condensing it at a higher, precisely the reverse of ordinary evaporations processes.’

In the machine, ether was contained in air-tight vessels. A cylinder at the centre was fitted with valves, so that each stroke of a piston would withdraw a quantity of ether vapour from the left hand side, forcing it into a condensing vessel on the right.