General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Planned Obsolescence and why Capitalism Can Never Deliver a perfect product [View all]Xipe Totec
(43,889 posts)In 1926, five years after winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, Albert Einstein read a news story about the death of a Berlin family, killed by toxic fumes that leaked from a broken seal in their refrigerator. Dangerous leaks like this were becoming an alarmingly frequent occurrence as old-fashioned ice boxes were replaced with modern refrigerators that used poisonous coolants.
Einstein became preoccupied with this tragedy, insisting that a better refrigerator design must be possible. He and former student Leó Szilárd a gifted young physicist who went on to conceive the nuclear chain reaction and electron microscope set out to find one.
Their approach to the problem sidestepped all conventional thinking about refrigeration. Because refrigerator leaks are usually caused when bearings and seals wear out, the team believed they could prevent this danger by designing a device with no moving parts: no motor, no mechanical motion, nothing to wear out. They used their knowledge of thermodynamics to produce an absorption refrigerator, a device that drove a combination of safer gases and liquids through three interconnected circuits. It required only a small pilot light as a heat source and was hermetically sealed and safe so safe that some experts estimate the casing could last 100 years.
https://blog.etsy.com/en/2012/the-einstein-refrigerator-built-to-last-100-years