After he revolutionized the concepts of space and time and helped usher in a new view of light and matter, Albert Einstein turned his talents to the refrigerator.
“He was a real gadget enthusiast,” said Gino Segre, who wrote a chapter on Einstein’s refrigerator in his recent book A Matter of Degrees. The great physicist had experience with practical devices: After graduating from the University of Zurich, Einstein worked in a Swiss patent office, figuring out how various inventions worked and evaluating their worth.
In his spare time, the young Einstein developed his theory of relativity and set the foundations for the emerging view of matter known as quantum mechanics.
Einstein’s refrigerator phase started later in his career, when he was in his mid-40s. He was putting much of his energy into trying to devise a “unified” theory that would combine his relativity with quantum mechanics, but he had more practical interests as well.
During the 1920s, household refrigerators were relatively new and could be dangerous. They worked by compressing toxic gases – ammonia, methyl chloride and sulfur dioxide. The compression would produce heat, which would be released into the outside air. Then the gases would be allowed to expand and cool, absorbing heat from inside the refrigerator.
In 1925 a German family died when toxic gas leaked from their refrigerator, and about that time, Einstein started looking for a safer device, Segre said.
Einstein teamed with Hungarian-born physicist Leo Szilard. They reworked the refrigerator pump, eliminating as many moving parts as possible to make it relatively leakproof. A German refrigerator company bought a patent for the equivalent of $10,000.
It might seem that if one of the greatest scientists of all times applied himself to building a better refrigerator, the result would be one amazing refrigerator. But technology is a quirky business.
No Einstein-Szilard refrigerator was ever built. The appliance was safer, but it was also more expensive, and the whole point was made moot in 1930 when American inventors came up with a new, nontoxic refrigerant called freon.
Of course, freon did have a downside, discovered much later, Segre said. Freon was found to contribute to the destruction of the Earth’s protective ozone layer, sending scientists scrambling for substitutes.
From courierpress.com