Name of old refrigeration technique

[Guy Burns]

I was wondering if some of the refrigeration experts on this forum could help me out with the name of an old refrigeration technique so that I can make further enquiries elsewhere on the net. At the moment I don't know where to start looking.

I'm putting together some stories about Western Queensland prior to 1960. The transcript below is from a fellow talking about refrigeration on a property in the 1930s, and I'd like to look into it a bit further: find out what the technique was called, how it worked, who sold them, that sort of thing. Here's the story:

"...We had a Delco lighting plant and it charged a seres of batteries. We had carbides, we had kerosene lamps. We didn’t get refrigeration until 1935, that’s when Electrolux first started the kerosene refrigerators. Our original one you had to heat it up with a primus sort of thing and when it got to a certain stage you used to reverse it and put the hot end into the water tank and then it would form frost on it. I remember an experience there, there was frost on this thing and I licked it and my tongue stuck to it of course. Pulled a bit of skin off.

It changed the whole west, refrigeration. It was the biggest change in the bush that’s ever been really. We had the charcoal cooler, charcoal around a centre that you opened, it had a door on it. You used to wet the charcoal, it worked like a waterbag, it evaporated which cooled the inside part. We also had the Coolgardie safe with sugar bags joined together and on the top you had a tray with water in it and you had the sugar bags hanging right down to another tray at the bottom to collect the water. So you got the water moving down the sugar bags and cooling it off..."

Any ideas what the frost device he mentions actually is?

[star882]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icyball