FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY

Waikato Times, Volume 107, Issue 18026, 22 May 1930, Page 14

FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY

REFRIGERATION HISTORY. A TENACIOUS PIONEER. This year Australia' celebrates the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of successful refrigeration into the meat and dairy produce industry. New Zealand and South American countries also sent their first successful shipments of frozen meat through the tropics to the Northern Hemisphere about the same time. Although refrigeration was not a new discovery, its inauguration and control on a commercial basis only followed a long period of research which culminated in the first successful shipments of frozen meat around the year 1880. With refrigeration the rapid development of the new countries of the Southern Hemisphere was made possible, and a new era in the sphere of food preservation and control was ushered in. An Ancient Kathod. The first people to dabble with refrigeration were the Saracens of Damascus and the Persians in the era of Haroun al Raschid. Saladin had some means by which snow gathered from the heights of the Lebanon mountains was kept unmelted in Damascus and used to cool beverages. In Persia snow and ice were used for a similar purpose in the ninth century. As far back as the 17th century frigoriflc mixtures for producing low temperatures were in use in London and in Paris. In 1762, Fahrenheit, in working out his thermometer scale, obtained what he conceived to be the absolute zero from a mixture of ice and salt. Ice had been made in India from time immemorial by the atmospheric evaporation at night of water in shallow trays, placed on an insulating layer of straw to cut off the earth heat.

In the early days of the last century, a small ice-making machine was placed on the market, which accomplished its work by the use of ammonium nitrate dissolved in water. The first attempt at ice-making in Britain would appear to have been that of Dr. Cullen, in 1755, who used a vacuum machine. However, none of these ideas brought refrigerated transport to light. That was reserved for Australia and New Zealand.

Mort’s Inspiration.

Somewhere about the middle of last century, Thomas Sutcliffe Mart, the founder of Mort’s Dock, Sydney, was reading his Sydney Morning Herald, and came across the report of the bursting of a glacier in Northern Europe. This huge mass of ice contained the body of a mammoth, which was in a state of perfect preservation, -skin, hair, everything, apparently as fresh as though it had been killed only a few days before. Mr Mort sprang up, struck the table with his fist, and said: “I have discovered how Australia’s abundance may supply Europe’s need!” In 1861, Mr Mort established freezing .works at Darling Harbour, and laid the foundation of what afterward, the writer believes, was known as the Fresh Food and Ice Company. The Initial Success. James Harrison, of Geelong, Victoria, In 1873, sent a shipment of frozen meat to England, but it did not arrive in good condition. Mr Mort, who had been experimenting feverishly since the establishment of his freezing works in 1861, fitted up the sailing ship Northam with an ammonia compression plant, which .broke down while the ship was still in harbour. Then Mr Coleman, of Glasgow, Scotland, invented a freezing machine which was used by butchers in London to preserve their meat during the hot weather. Mr Andrew Mcllwraith heard of this machine and fitted up a ship, the steamer Strathleven, to carry frozen meat. In due time she arrived in Sydney and loaded up with beef and mutton, mostly the latter. This arrived in England in perfect condition and realised 4£d and a pound, the original cost An Sydney being to 2d a pound. That was the beginning of the frozen meat trade, for just about the time these things were happening, a cargo of meat was shipped from Buenos Ayres by the steamer Paraguay to France and arrived in good order, and changed the history of South America. The first successful shipment was sent Home from the South Island of New Zealand also about that time. The establishment of the regrigerating industry in Sydney cost Mr Mort over £BI,OOO, and whether it ever really paid him no one seems to know. He conducted exhaustive researches himself and by means of a trained staff, and he also financed a number of experimenters in England and France, as well as in Australia.

No 9ne has done more for the social and commercial development of the Dominions than those early experimenters in the sphere of refrigeration; to them New Zealand owes her growing export trade and the greater part of her wealth to-day. Refrigeration will allow for considerably greater development in the future; in fact, one could say with considerable justification in this, the 50th year of its inauguration as a dominating factor in the control of foodstuffs, that each year refrigeration is going to play a bigger and bigger part in commercial circles and that, with its help, _ New Zealand will continue to move toward greater and still greater prosperity.