Science Stories: Series 1 - Einstein’s Ice Box

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 February 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the late 1920s Einstein was working on a grand unified theory of the universe, having given us E=mc2, space-time and the fourth dimension. He was also working on a fridge.

Perhaps motivated by a story in the Berlin newspapers about a family who died when toxic fumes leaked from their state-of the-art refrigerator, Einstein teamed up with another physicist Leo Szilard and designed a new, safer refrigerating technology. And so it was that in 1930, the man who had once famously worked in the patent office in Bern was granted a patent of his own. Number: 1, 781, 541. Title: refrigeration.

Phillip Ball explores this little known period of Einstein's life to try and find out why he turned his extraordinary mind to making fridges safer.

Despite considerable commercial interest in the patent, Einstein's fridge didn't get built in his lifetime. The Great Depression forced AEG and others to close down their refrigeration research. But in 2008 a team of British scientists decided to give it a go. Their verdict : Einstein's fridge doesn't work.

(Photo: Refridgerators stand in rows. Credit: Keystone/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading from the BBC.
0:03.0	The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use,
0:07.0	go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts.
0:10.0	I'm Philip Ball and this is Discovery on the BBC World Service.
0:17.0	Time now for another science story.
0:20.0	Picture Albert Einstein in Berlin in the mid-1920s. He's kick-started quantum theory, he's cracked
0:28.0	relativity, and now he's embarking on his last great quest, the one that was to confound him for the rest of his life,
0:36.4	searching for a unified theory that would link all the forces of nature in a single master equation. This is the Einstein we think we know,
0:47.0	grappling with the deepest and most obstinate mysteries of the world. But at the same time Einstein was working on something else.
0:57.1	He was inventing a fridge.
1:00.1	Yes, Einstein was an inventor.
1:03.4	It was never a big part of his work, it's true.
1:06.3	But he took it seriously, and in 1930, 21 years after leaving his job in the Patent Office
1:12.0	in Byrne,
1:13.0	Switzerland, he was granted a patent of his own.
1:16.0	Number 1781541, title Refrigeration. This is the story of Einstein's Fridge, why he invented it, how it worked, and what became of it.
1:30.0	It's a tale that reveals a little known and rather unlikely aspect of this iconic scientist.
1:37.0	And it makes me wonder why, when he was an international celebrity for having reshaped the universe, did Einstein decide to make a fridge? Berlin in the 1920s was in the throes of Weymah Decadence.
1:57.0	They call me naughty Lola, the wisest us on us,
2:05.0	a counterculture of drugs and prostitution,
2:09.4	with nightclubs staging risque performances. They call me Nardilola the wisest girl on earth.
2:16.0	At home my pianola.
	...

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