Chapter 05 of 5
Cooling Without a Compressor
Desert ice houses, clay pots and Einstein's silent fridge.
- Ancient Cold
Ice in the Desert
Persian engineers built yakhchals, domed ice houses, in hot, dry regions long before electricity.
- The Method
Making Ice at Night
On clear winter nights, shallow channels of water froze in the desert air, and the ice was then stored in the insulated dome.
- The Physics
Radiating to the Sky
On clear nights surfaces lose heat as infrared radiation to the sky and can fall below the air temperature.
17 more cards in this chapter
Could you answer this?
What was unusual about the refrigerator Einstein and Leo Szilard patented in 1930?
❄️ Your Fridge Doesn't Make Cold
- 01Cold Is Not a ThingWhy a fridge moves heat instead of making cold, and how we got there from frozen lakes.
- 02The Loop Inside the WallThe four-step cycle that pumps heat out of your food.
- 03Poison in the PantryDeadly early refrigerants, the chemist who found a safer one, and the hole in the sky.
- 04The Cold RevolutionHow cheap cold changed meat, fruit, shopping and medicine.
- 05Cooling Without a CompressorDesert ice houses, clay pots and Einstein's silent fridge.