7th December: Fridges

On this date in 1926, the household refrigerator, operating on gas, was patented by Electrolux Servel. Some little known facts about fridges.

1. In Pennsylvania it is illegal to sleep outdoors on top of a fridge.
2. Around 10-12% of a household energy bill is from running the fridge.
3. 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.
4. The temperature inside the fridge should be around 3-5 degrees. The ideal temperature for a freezer is -18 degrees.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.”
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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!!