On this date in 1926, the household refrigerator, operating on gas, was patented by Electrolux Servel. Some little known facts about fridges.
- In Pennsylvania it is illegal to sleep outdoors on top of a fridge.
- Around 10-12% of a household energy bill is from running the fridge.
- A third to a half of the cold air in the fridge escapes when the door is open - so to save money don't leave the fridge door open for any longer than necessary.
- The temperature inside the fridge should be around 3-5 degrees. The ideal temperature for a freezer is -18 degrees.
- The first refrigerator to see widespread use was the General Electric "Monitor-Top" refrigerator introduced in 1927, so-called because it looked like the gun turret on the warship USS Monitor.
- Albert Einstein co-invented a refrigerator. He read about a family who had been killed by coolant leaking from their fridge, and with his former student Leo Szilard set out to invent a safer one. It was patented in 1930.
- There have actually been a couple of films made about fridges. The 1938 film White Banners is about an amateur inventor who creates a refrigerator. The 1986 film The Mosquito Coast is about a man who “moved to the jungle and built a giant refrigerator.”
- The largest fridge in the world is 27 kilometers long. It's not for keeping food and drink in, though. It was created to keep the Large Hadron Collider cool.
- At the opposite extreme, in 2006, nanotechnology researchers at the University of Alabama and Belgium’s Hasselt University proposed an idea for the world’s smallest refrigerator. Known as a Brownian refrigerator, the molecular-scale device would theoretically be used to keep nanoscale machines cool and control temperatures during molecular biology experiments.
- Another fridge related world record is held by Louise Greenfarb from Nevada - she has the world's biggest collection of fridge magnets - over 32,000 of them. She'd need the 27 kilometre fridge to put them on!!
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