Low-temperature technology timeline

The following is a timeline of low-temperature technology and cryogenic technology (refrigeration down to –150 °C, –238 °F or 123 K and cryogenics).

18th century BCE – 18th century

• c. 1700 BCE – Zimri-Lin, ruler of Mari in Syria commanded the construction of one of the first ice houses near the Euphrates.
• c. 500 BCE – The yakhchal (meaning "ice pit" in Persian;) is an ancient Persian type of refrigerator. The structure was formed from a mortar resistant to heat transmission, in the shape of a dome. Snow and ice was stored beneath the ground, effectively allowing access to ice even in hot months and allowing for prolonged food preservation. Often a badgir was coupled with the yakhchal in order to slow the heat loss. Modern refrigerators are still called yakhchal in Persian.
• 1396 CE - Ice storage warehouses called "Dong-bing-go-tango (meaning "east ice storage warehouse" in Korean) and Seo-bing-go ("west ice storage warehouse") were built in Han-Yang (currently Seoul, Korea). The buildings housed ice that was collected from the frozen Han River in January (by lunar calendar). The warehouse was well-insulated, providing the royal families with ice into the summer months. These warehouses were closed in 1898 AD but the buildings are still intact in Seoul.
• 1650 – Otto von Guericke designed and built the world's first vacuum pump and created the world's first ever vacuum known as the Magdeburg hemispheres to disprove Aristotle's long-held supposition that 'Nature abhors a vacuum'.
• 1656 – Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke built an air pump on this design.
• 1662 – Boyle's law (gas law relating pressure and volume) is demonstrated using a vacuum pump
• 1665 – Boyle theorizes a minimum temperature in New Experiments and Observations touching Cold.
• 1679 – Denis Papin – safety valve
• 1702 – Guillaume Amontons first calculates absolute zero to be −240 °C using an air thermometer, theorizing at this point the gas would reach zero volume and zero pressure.
• 1756 – The first documented public demonstration of artificial refrigeration by William Cullen
• 1782 – Antoine Lavoisier and Pierre-Simon Laplace invent the ice-calorimeter
• 1784 – Gaspard Monge liquefied the first gas producing liquid sulfur dioxide.
• 1787 – Charles's law (Gas law, relating volume and temperature)

19th century

• 1802 – John Dalton wrote "the reducibility of all elastic fluids of whatever kind, into liquids"
• 1802 – Gay-Lussac's law (Gas law, relating temperature and pressure).
• 1803 – Domestic ice box
• 1803 – Thomas Moore of Baltimore, Md. received a patent on refrigeration.
• 1805 – Oliver Evans designed the first closed circuit refrigeration machine based on the vapor-compression refrigeration cycle.
• 1809 – Jacob Perkins patented the first refrigerating machine
• 1810 – John Leslie freezes water to ice by using an airpump.
• 1811 – Avogadro's law a gas law
• 1823 – Michael Faraday liquified ammonia to cause cooling
• 1824 – Sadi Carnot– the Carnot Cycle
• 1834 – Ideal gas law
• 1834 – Jacob Perkins obtained the first patent for a vapor-compression refrigeration system.
• 1834 – Jean-Charles Peltier discovers the Peltier effect
• 1844 – Charles Piazzi Smyth proposes comfort cooling
• c.1850 – Michael Faraday makes a hypothesis that freezing substances increases their dielectric constant.
• 1851 – John Gorrie patented his mechanical refrigeration machine in the US to make ice to cool the air
• 1856 – James Harrison patented an ether liquid-vapour compression refrigeration system and developed the first practical ice-making and refrigeration room for use in the brewing and meat-packing industries of Geelong, Victoria, Australia.
• 1857 – Carl Wilhelm Siemens, the Siemens cycle
• 1858 – Julius Plücker observed for the first time some pumping effect due to electrical discharge.
• 1859 – Ferdinand Carré – The first gas absorption refrigeration system using gaseous ammonia dissolved in water (referred to as "aqua ammonia")
• 1862 – Alexander Carnegie Kirk invents the Air cycle machine
• 1864 – Charles Tellier patented a refrigeration system using dimethyl ether
• 1869 – Charles Tellier installed a cold storage plant in France.
• 1871 – Carl von Linde built his first ammonia compression machine.
• 1876 – Carl von Linde patented equipment to liquefy air using the Joule Thomson expansion process and regenerative cooling
• 1877 – Raoul Pictet and Louis Paul Cailletet, working separately, develop two methods to liquefy oxygen.
• 1879 – Bell-Coleman machine
• 1882 – William Soltau Davidson fitted a compression refrigeration unit to the New Zealand vessel Dunedin
• 1883 – Zygmunt Wróblewski condenses experimentally useful quantities of liquid oxygen
• 1885 – Zygmunt Wróblewski published hydrogen's critical temperature as 33 K; critical pressure, 13.3 atmospheres; and boiling point, 23 K.
• 1888 – Loftus Perkins develops the "Arktos" cold chamber for preserving food, using an early ammonia absorption system.
• 1892 – James Dewar invents the vacuum-insulated, silver-plated glass Dewar flask
• 1895 – Carl von Linde files for patent protection of the Hampson–Linde cycle for liquefaction of atmospheric air or other gases (approved in 1903).
• 1898 – James Dewar condenses liquid hydrogen by using regenerative cooling and his invention, the vacuum flask.

20th century

• 1905 – Carl von Linde obtains pure liquid oxygen and nitrogen.
• 1906 – Willis Carrier patents the basis for modern air conditioning.
• 1908 – Heike Kamerlingh Onnes liquifies helium.
• 1911 – Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discloses his research on metallic low-temperature phenomenon characterised by no electrical resistance, calling it superconductivity.
• 1915 – Wolfgang Gaede – the Diffusion pump
• 1920 – Edmund Copeland and Harry Edwards use iso-butane in small refrigerators.
• 1922 – Baltzar von Platen and Carl Munters invent the 3 fluids absorption chiller, exclusively driven by heat.
• 1924 – Fernand Holweck – the Holweck pump
• 1926 – Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd invent the Einstein refrigerator.
• 1926 – Willem Hendrik Keesom solidifies helium.
• 1926 – General Electric Company introduced the first hermetic compressor refrigerator
• 1929 - David Forbes Keith of Toronto, Ontario, Canada received a patent for the Icy Ball which helped hundreds of thousands of families through the Dirty Thirties.
• 1933 – William Giauque and others – Adiabatic demagnetization refrigeration
• 1937 – Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, John F. Allen, and Don Misener discover superfluidity using helium-4 at 2.2 K
• 1937 – Frans Michel Penning invents a type of cold cathode vacuum gauge known as Penning gauge
• 1944 – Manne Siegbahn, the Siegbahn pump
• 1951 – Heinz London invents the principle of the dilution refrigerator
• 1955 – Willi Becker turbomolecular pump concept
• 1957 – Lewis D. Hall, Robert L. Jepsen and John C. Helmer ion pump based on Penning discharge
• 1959 – Kleemenko cycle
• 1972 – David Lee, Robert Coleman Richardson and Douglas Osheroff discover superfluidity in helium-3 at 0.002 K.
• 1973 – Linear compressor
• 1978 – Laser cooling demonstrated in the groups of Wineland and Dehmelt.
• 1983 - Orifice-type pulse tube refrigerator invented by Mikulin, Tarasov, and Shkrebyonock
• 1986 – Karl Alexander Müller and J. Georg Bednorz discover high-temperature superconductivity
• 1995 – Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman create the first Bose–Einstein condensate, using a dilute gas of Rubidium-87 cooled to 170 nK. They won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001 for BEC.

21st century

• 2014 - NASA proposes the Cold Atom Lab to fly on board the International Space Station to go to 100 pK.

See also

• List of timelines
• Liquefaction of gases
• History of superconductivity
• History of thermodynamics
• Timeline of temperature and pressure measurement technology
• Timeline of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and random processes
• Industrial gas

External links

• Refrigeration History