“They Died In Their Beds”
The Dark History of the Refrigerator: A Timeline
Technologies are never neutral.
The home refrigerator has been sometimes dangerous, and too often, fatal.
In the simplest sense, a timeline functions as a visual representation of the passage of time; a linear journey from a starting point to an endpoint. It can mark the beginning of something, anything really, and follow a chronological trajectory all the way to the end, or on any point in between. Timelines can show the complete chronology of your favourite film franchise, the lifetime of a writer, or the evolution of the universe. We can also trace a technology through time, and in theory, it’s fairly simple.
Consider the iPhone. At the beginning is the 2G, released in 2007. We could then follow all the releases over the past 14 or so years and end at today’s iPhone 13 Pro Max, (though by the time I’m finished writing, editing and publishing this, it will probably be something else already!) A timeline of the iPhone laid out this way would be accurate, but also pretty dull (although there are a few very cool iPhone timelines). A timeline tells a story, and stories about the what are never as interesting as those about the who and the why, or one that raises new questions.
The refrigerator as a technology wouldn’t fare much better in a timeline dedicated solely to the “thing”. I struggled slightly with choosing one context in which to place the fridge into a timeline. The post-war period of the 1950s through to the 1970s is particularly meaty; starting with the supermarket’s heyday, to the mass exodus to suburbia that corralled housewives into their neat homes, complete with the latest refrigerator technologies and the onslaught of frozen and processed food to fill them. Then we move into the 1960s and 1970s, with more women are entering the workforce, a decline in cooking, and the home refrigerator as a fortress for convenient TV dinners that would usher in a new era of eating poorly for convenience that we are still in today. As much as there is to talk about socially and culturally, I’m reserving those for later and allowing my timeline to take a bit of a turn. There is a tension that occurs when a technology solves one problem while creating new ones. For this timeline, I’ve decided to introduce some of those tensions and explore the darker side of the fridge, and I admit, the process was uncomfortable. For all the convenience it brought, the refrigerator also brought illness, CO2 pollution, environmental havoc, and an unacceptable amount of tragedy. The movement of technological advances from concept to invention to consumer has never been swifter than it is today. It’s a good exercise to be reminded that our technologies are not neutral, and there are consequences to our desire for speedy developments that feed our desire for convenience.
Click through the timeline here (thank you, Timeline JS) and explore some of the ways the home refrigerator has been sometimes dangerous, too often fatal, and how we have mitigated these problems over time.
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