Many people know that work on nuclear weapons enabled the development of the first electronic computers. But it’s no less true that the humble refrigerator, in a roundabout way, enabled the development of the first atom bomb.
In 1930 on 11 November, Patent number US1781541 is awarded to Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard for their invention, the Einstein refrigerator. They two eventually being granted 45 patents in their names for three different models.
The refrigerator was not immediately put into commercial production, the most promising of their patents being quickly bought up by the Swedish company Electrolux. Einstein and Szilard earned $750 (the equivalent of $10,000 today).
While reading the newspaper one morning in 1926, Albert Einstein nearly choked on his eggs entire family in Berlin, including several children, had suffocated a few nights before when a seal on their refrigerator broke and toxic gas flooded their apartment. Anguished, the forty-seven-year-old physicist called up a young friend of his, the inventor and scientist Leo Szilard. “There must be a better way,” Einstein pleaded.
The Einstein-Szilard fridge actually used three liquids and gases, not two, making it a tad more complicated than the modern fridge . But their design did have several advantages over regular fridges. With no motor, it made no noise and rarely broke down. It also used no electricity (just methane), and it avoided the seals that all too often broke and leaked toxic gas.
Excerpt) Read more at: WIRED (originally written by Sam Kean is the New York Times bestselling author of The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons,The Disappearing Spoon, and The Violinist’s Thumb.) .
No comments:
Post a Comment