"Chill quiz"

To celebrate World Refrigeration Day, we test your knowledge of the pioneers of the industry.

​This article appears in HVAC&R Nation, June/July 2020

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World Refrigeration Day is an international awareness campaign to raise the profile of the refrigeration, air conditioning and heat-pump sector.

It focuses attention on the significant role that the industry and its technology play in modern life and society and draws attention to the engineering and science that is at the very heart of modern life.

The first inaugural World Refrigeration Day was held on June 26, 2019.

While the day is bound to be recognised differently this year due to the worldwide impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, June 26 will still be a day to celebrate.

So put down your tools, store your cylinders (in an upright position) and turn your attention to the pioneers of our industry – those men and women who have shaped the science, invention and importance of refrigeration and air conditioning for the benefit of society.
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From early scientists to champions of the modern day, we challenge you to this superquiz of the HVAC&R world.

THE CHILL QUIZ

1.

The son of a fisherman, I was born in Scotland in 1816.

Following my education at Anderson’s University and the Glasgow Mechanics’ Institute, I trained as a printing apprentice before emigrating to Sydney in 1837 to set up a printing press for the English company Tegg & Co.

I moved to Melbourne two years later and established the Geelong Advertiser in 1840 before buying the paper outright in 1842. I became an inaugural member of the Geelong Council in 1850 and represented the area in both houses of the Victorian Parliament.

While cleaning the moveable type on the Advertiser’s printing presses with sulfuric ether, I discovered that the chemical might have other uses. With a growing interest in refrigeration and ice-making, I began to experiment with the ether and a whorl coil sourced from a heating apparatus.

My first ice-making machine followed in 1854 and I was granted a patent for an ether vapour compression refrigeration system the following year. The system used a compressor to force ether through a condenser where it cooled and liquefied. This gas was then circulated through refrigeration coils and vaporised again, cooling down the surrounding machine.

My second machine was the world’s first functioning refrigerator, and was used to chill beer.

I established an ice works on the banks of the Barwon River with a local blacksmith before I founded the Victoria Ice Works in Melbourne in 1859. In 1860, I established the Sydney Ice Company with PN Russell before pursuing shipboard refrigeration systems to carry Australian meat to the UK.

Sadly, my obsession with refrigeration would not translate to sustained financial success but despite this, I am regarded as Australia’s father of refrigeration.

I am James... (5 points)

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2.

The son of a mathematics and engineering teacher at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, I became a renowned physicist and engineer and the first British scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords.

At the University of Glasgow, I completed important mathematical analysis of electricity with some of my early work based on the concept of an ice engine.

This led to me consider the link between pressure and temperature. I predicted that the melting point of ice must fall with pressure, from which I discovered absolute zero – the temperature at which no more heat can be lost.
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My discovery started a race to achieve this incredible cold with the promise of revealing insights into the nature of matter including liquefied gases, magnetic oxygen, uphill flowing liquids and levitating superconductors.
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I collaborated by letter with James Prescott Joule in the mid-1850s. Together we discovered the Joule-Thomson effect of expansion – the concept behind modern refrigerators.

In 1892, I was ennobled in recognition of my achievements in thermodynamics and bestowed the title of Baron – the title referring to the river that flows near my former university laboratory. And despite offers from several world-renowned universities, I remained in Glasgow where I published over 650 scientific papers and applied for 70 patents before my retirement.
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Today, my legacy lives on through thermodynamics. The base unit of temperature in the International System of Units (SI) is named in my honour, while World Refrigeration Day is held on my birth date.

I am Lord... (10 points)

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3.

I was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1886.

A college dropout who moved to New Mexico to work for the US Department of Agriculture, I trapped and preserved small mammals as part of a research project into malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

In 1912, I moved to Newfoundland as a fur trapper before being introduced to ice fishing by local Inuits.

Here, I witnessed how caught fish instantly froze in the sub-Arctic conditions. When thawed, they looked and tasted fresh. The freezing occurred so fast and at such low temperatures that only tiny ice crystals formed. These ice crystals were so small that they didn’t cause the damage to cellular structures that a slow drop in freezing did.

By 1922, I began developing flash-freezing of fish on an industrial scale. It took three years – and left me on the brink of bankruptcy – but eventually my multi-plate freezer worked. The fresh fish was packed flat to maximum surface area, and placed in cartons that were fed onto a steel conveyer belt. The metal surface was chilled to -43°C using refrigerated brine circulating underneath. A similar system cooled the roof above the conveyor, which was pushed down onto the cartons as they passed through.

While many technological advances have occurred since, the principles of my first flash-freezing system remain today.

In 1924, I established General Seaford Corporation in Massachusetts. Despite selling my company and patents in 1929, my surname became a household brand and I was even given the moniker of “Captain” despite no naval experience.

I am Clarence... (15 points)

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4.

Born in 1963, I grew up on an orchard farm outside of New York City before attending Cornell University where I studied physics, biology, chemistry, computer sciences and mathematics.

After graduating in 1976 with a degree in physics, I knocked back opportunities for post-graduate education to join Sea-Land, a shipping company founded by the inventor of shipping containers, Malcolm McLean.
It led to me to work in a Mobile Research Laboratory – a modified 40-foot shipping container that was part science lab, part mobile home.

Spending much of my twenties living inside the refrigerated shipping container, my colleagues and I travelled the world studying the impact of transportation on fresh and frozen products.

These findings led to all sorts of innovations – from reefer container design through to packing methods and customisation to achieve the particular ventilation, airflows and temperatures required to sustain the effective transportation of fresh produce.

The results of my research helped to revolutionise the reefer business and led to many advances in both the technologies and methods used to transport refrigerated goods around the world.
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Today, I am the director of refrigerated services for Maersk Line in North America and am commonly referred to as the Queen of Cool.
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I am Barbara... (20 points)

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5.

Born in 1701, I was a Swedish astronomer, physicist and mathematician.

In 1736, while in Lapland to measure the shape of the Earth, I found that Fahrenheit-built thermometers did not extend the range of cold far enough to measure the true depths of the cold air and ice I experienced.
Upon my return to Sweden, I created a new scale that set the freezing point of water at 100 and the boiling point at 0.

In 1741 I proposed a new temperature scale in a paper to the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, the oldest Swedish scientific society. In 1745, a year after my death, the scale was reversed by Carl Linnaeus to facilitate more practical measurement.
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But it would be over 200 years before the scale of temperature formerly known as centigrade had its name changed in my honour.
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I am Anders... (5 points)

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6.

Born in Edinburgh Scotland in 1820, I was a founding contributor to the science of thermodynamics alongside Rudolf Clausius and Sir William Thomson.

As a Glasgow University engineer and physicist, I succeeded in finding the relationship between saturated vapour pressure and temperature in 1849.
The following year, I used my theory to establish relationships between the temperature, pressure and density of gases, and expressions for the latent heat of evaporation of a liquid – accurately predicting that the apparent specific heat of saturated steam would be negative.

In 1851, I set out to calculate the efficiency of heat engines and used my theory to deduce that the maximum efficiency possible for any heat engine is a function only of the two temperatures between which it operates.

I developed a complete theory of the steam engine, with my manuals continuing to be in use for decades after their publication in the 1850s and 1860s.

In 1859, I proposed an absolute scale of thermodynamic temperature to be used in engineering systems where heat computations were done using degrees of Fahrenheit. Similar to the Kelvin scale, the zero on my scale is absolute zero but each temperature difference is defined as one Fahrenheit degree rather than Celsius degree.
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The model used to predict the performance of steam turbine systems is named in my honour.
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I am William... (10 points)

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7.

I was born in Angola, New York in 1876 and studied at Cornell University before graduating in 1901 with a Bachelor of Engineering degree.

When working as a young engineer on a hot summer’s evening in 1902, I was called to solve a problem at a Brooklyn print works – it was too humid for the ink to dry fast enough.

My solution would become recognised as the world’s first modern air conditioning system. After several years of field testing and refinement, I was granted US Patent 808,897 in January 1906 for an Apparatus for Treating Air.

The same year, I discovered that constant dew-point depression provided practically constant relative humidity, which would later become known by air conditioning engineers as the “law of constant dew-point compression”. I based the design of an automatic control system on this discovery, and was granted US Patent 1,085,971 in February 1914.

In 1911, I presented one of the most significant documents ever prepared for air conditioning – Rational Psychometric Formulae – to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It tied together the concepts of relative humidity, absolute humidity and dew-point temperature.

Following the start of World War I, I joined with six other young engineers to form a company bearing my name. Enduring the financial and social challenges of the Great Depression, the company emerged as one of the largest employers in central New York.
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After World War II, the popularity of mechanical air conditioning grew across America and globally. The company remained at the forefront of air conditioning technology design and manufacture, and became a household name.
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I am Willis... (10 points)

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8.

Born in Nigeria, I was a teacher who hailed from a family of pot makers.

I found worldwide fame in 2001 through the creation of my Pot-in-Pot cooling system. This simple refrigerator keeps food cool in the desert, where it usually perishes quickly, depriving farmers of much needed income.

My invention was inspired by the ancient Arabian zeer. It uses earthenware pots and evaporative cooling.

Fresh food is placed inside a watertight ceramic pot, which is housed within a larger unglazed pot. The space between the two pots is then filled with damp river sand and the pots covered. As the water in the sand evaporates in the desert air, heat from the contents of the inner pot is drawn away to keep the contents cool.

In one of the first trials, eggplants were found to stay fresh for 27 days compared to the usual three days. This discovery meant farmers could sell their produce on demand rather than rush sell because of spoilage, effectively boosting their income.

In 2001, I received the Rolex Award for Enterprise and used the $75,000 award to make the invention available across Nigeria where I established numerous pot factories using traditional, pottery techniques. The same year, my invention was named as one of the Inventions of the Year by Time magazine.

By 2005, I had distributed nearly 100,000 Pot-in-Pot systems across Nigeria as well as parts of Cameroon, Chad, Eritrea, Niger and Sudan. In 2008, an adaption of the concept was used in Guinea by humanitarian medical non-governmental organisation Doctors Without Borders to store antimalarial drugs for children.

I am Mohammed Bah... (25 points)

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ANSWERS

1 James Harrison (5 points)
2 Lord Kelvin (10 points)
​3 Clarence Birdseye (15 points)
4 Barbara Pratt (20 points)
5 Anders Celsius (5 points)
6 William Rankine (10 points)
7 Willis Carrier (10 points)
​8 Mohammed Bah Abba (25 points) 

HOW DID YOU SCORE?

0–24

And you call yourself a HVAC&R professional?

25–49

You've got reading to do, and we're not talking Lighter Side entries!

50–74

Good work. You're more than just a technical wiz.

75–100

We think Eddie has a Hot Seat with your name on it!

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