Timeline of low temperature technology

Updated on Sep 29, 2024

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The following is a timeline of low-temperature technology and cryogenic technology (refrigeration down to –150 °C, –238 °F or 123 K and cryogenics).

18th century BCE – 18th century

c. 1700 BCE – Zimri-Lim, ruler of Mari in Syria commanded the construction of one of the first ice houses near the Euphrates.

c. 500 BCE – The yakhchal (meaning "ice pit" in Persian;) is an ancient Persian type of refrigerator. The structure was formed from a mortar resistant to heat transmission, in the shape of a dome. Snow and ice was stored beneath the ground, effectively allowing access to ice even in hot months and allowing for prolonged food preservation. Often a badgir was coupled with the yakhchal in order to slow the heat loss. Modern refrigerators are still called yakhchal in Persian.

1396 CE - Ice storage warehouses called "Dong-bing-go-tango (meaning "east ice storage warehouse" in Korean) and Seo-bing-go ("west ice storage warehouse") were built in Han-Yang (currently Seoul, Korea). The buildings housed ice that was collected from the frozen Han River in January (by lunar calendar). The warehouse was well-insulated, providing the royal families with ice into the summer months. These warehouses were closed in 1898 AD but the buildings are still intact in Seoul.

1650 – Otto von Guericke designed and built the world's first vacuum pump and created the world's first ever vacuum known as the Magdeburg hemispheres to disprove Aristotle's long-held supposition that 'Nature abhors a vacuum'.

1656 – Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke built an air pump on this design.

1662 – Boyle's law (gas law relating pressure and volume) is demonstrated using a vacuum pump

1665 – Boyle theorizes a minimum temperature in New Experiments and Observations touching Cold.

1679 – Denis Papin – safety valve

1702 – Guillaume Amontons first calculates absolute zero to be −240 °C using an air thermometer, theorizing at this point the gas would reach zero volume and zero pressure.

1756 – The first documented public demonstration of artificial refrigeration by William Cullen

1782 – Antoine Lavoisier and Pierre-Simon Laplace invent the ice-calorimeter

1784 – Gaspard Monge liquefied the first gas producing liquid sulfur dioxide.

1787 – Charles's law (Gas law, relating volume and temperature)

19th century

1802 – John Dalton wrote "the reducibility of all elastic fluids of whatever kind, into liquids"

1802 – Gay-Lussac's law (Gas law, relating temperature and pressure).

1803 – Domestic ice box

1803 – Thomas Moore of Baltimore, Md. received a patent on refrigeration.

1805 – Oliver Evans designed the first closed circuit refrigeration machine based on the vapor-compression refrigeration cycle.

1809 – Jacob Perkins patented the first refrigerating machine

1810 – John Leslie freezes water to ice by using an airpump.

1811 – Avogadro's law a gas law

1823 – Michael Faraday liquified ammonia to cause cooling

1824 – Sadi Carnot– the Carnot Cycle

1834 – Ideal gas law

1834 – Jacob Perkins obtained the first patent for a vapor-compression refrigeration system.

1834 – Jean-Charles Peltier discovers the Peltier effect

1844 – Charles Piazzi Smyth proposes comfort cooling

c.1850 – Michael Faraday makes a hypothesis that freezing substances increases their dielectric constant.

1851 – John Gorrie patented his mechanical refrigeration machine in the US to make ice to cool the air

1856 – James Harrison patented an ether liquid-vapour compression refrigeration system and developed the first practical ice-making and refrigeration room for use in the brewing and meat-packing industries of Geelong, Victoria, Australia.

1857 – Carl Wilhelm Siemens, the Siemens cycle

1858 – Julius Plücker observed for the first time some pumping effect due to electrical discharge.

1859 – Ferdinand Carré – The first gas absorption refrigeration system using gaseous ammonia dissolved in water (referred to as "aqua ammonia")

1862 – Alexander Carnegie Kirk invents the Air cycle machine

1864 – Charles Tellier patented a refrigeration system using dimethyl ether

1869 – Charles Tellier installed a cold storage plant in France.

1871 – Carl von Linde built his first ammonia compression machine.

1876 – Carl von Linde patented equipment to liquefy air using the Joule Thomson expansion process and regenerative cooling

1877 – Raoul Pictet and Louis Paul Cailletet, working separately, develop two methods to liquefy oxygen.

1879 – Bell-Coleman machine

1882 – William Soltau Davidson fitted a compression refrigeration unit to the New Zealand vessel Dunedin

1883 – Zygmunt Wróblewski condenses experimentally useful quantities of liquid oxygen

1885 – Zygmunt Wróblewski published hydrogen's critical temperature as 33 K; critical pressure, 13.3 atmospheres; and boiling point, 23 K.

1888 – Loftus Perkins develops the "Arktos" cold chamber for preserving food, using an early ammonia absorption system.

1892 – James Dewar invents the vacuum-insulated, silver-plated glass Dewar flask

1895 – Carl von Linde files for patent protection of the Hampson–Linde cycle for liquefaction of atmospheric air or other gases (approved in 1903).

1898 – James Dewar condenses liquid hydrogen by using regenerative cooling and his invention, the vacuum flask.

20th century

1905 – Carl von Linde obtains pure liquid oxygen and nitrogen.

1906 – Willis Carrier patents the basis for modern air conditioning.

1908 – Heike Kamerlingh Onnes liquifies helium.

1911 – Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discloses his research on metallic low-temperature phenomenon characterised by no electrical resistance, calling it superconductivity.

1915 – Wolfgang Gaede – the Diffusion pump

1920 – Edmund Copeland and Harry Edwards use iso-butane in small refrigerators.

1922 – Baltzar von Platen and Carl Munters invent the 3 fluids absorption chiller, exclusively driven by heat.

1924 – Fernand Holweck – the Holweck pump

1926 – Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd invent the Einstein refrigerator.

1926 – Willem Hendrik Keesom solidifies helium.

1926 – General Electric Company introduced the first hermetic compressor refrigerator

1929 - David Forbes Keith of Toronto, Ontario, Canada received a patent for the Icy Ball which helped hundreds of thousands of families through the Dirty Thirties.

1933 – William Giauque and others – Adiabatic demagnetization refrigeration

1937 – Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, John F. Allen, and Don Misener discover superfluidity using helium-4 at 2.2 K

1937 – Frans Michel Penning invents a type of cold cathode vacuum gauge known as Penning gauge

1944 – Manne Siegbahn, the Siegbahn pump

1951 – Heinz London invents the principle of the dilution refrigerator

1955 – Willi Becker turbomolecular pump concept

1957 – Lewis D. Hall, Robert L. Jepsen and John C. Helmer ion pump based on Penning discharge

1959 – Kleemenko cycle

1972 – David Lee, Robert Coleman Richardson and Douglas Osheroff discover superfluidity in helium-3 at 0.002 K.

1973 – Linear compressor

1978 – Laser cooling demonstrated in the groups of Wineland and Dehmelt.

1983 - Orifice-type pulse tube refrigerator invented by Mikulin, Tarasov, and Shkrebyonock

1986 – Karl Alexander Müller and J. Georg Bednorz discover high-temperature superconductivity

1995 – Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman create the first Bose–Einstein condensate, using a dilute gas of Rubidium-87 cooled to 170 nK. They won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001 for BEC.

1999 - The current world record was set at 100 picokelvins (pK), or 0.000 000 000 1 of a kelvin, by cooling the nuclear spins in a piece of rhodium metal.

21st century

2000 - Nuclear spin temperatures below 100 pK were reported for an experiment at the Helsinki University of Technology's Low Temperature Lab in Espoo, Finland. However, this was the temperature of one particular degree of freedom – a quantum property called nuclear spin – not the overall average thermodynamic temperature for all possible degrees in freedom.

2013 - Physicist Ulrich Schneider of the University of Munich in Germany reported to have achieved temperatures below absolute zero ("negative temperatures") in gases; the gas reportedly became hotter rather than colder.

2014 - Scientists in the CUORE collaboration at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy cooled a copper vessel with a volume of one cubic meter to 0.006 kelvins (−273.144 °C; −459.659 °F) for 15 days, setting a record for the lowest temperature in the known universe over such a large contiguous volume

2015 - Experimental physicists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) successfully cooled molecules in a gas of sodium potassium to a temperature of 500 nanokelvins, and it is expected to exhibit an exotic state of matter by cooling these molecules a bit further.

2017 - Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL), an experimental instrument being developed for launch to the International Space Station (ISS) in June. The instrument will create extremely cold conditions in the microgravity environment of the ISS leading to the formation of Bose Einstein Condensates that are a magnitude colder than those that are created in laboratories on Earth. In a space-based laboratory, up to 20 seconds interaction times and as low as 1 picokelvin temperatures are achievable, and it could lead to exploration of unknown quantum mechanical phenomena and test some of the most fundamental laws of physics.

References

Timeline of low-temperature technology Wikipedia

(Text) CC BY-SA

Contents

18th century BCE – 18th century

19th century

20th century

21st century

References