A journey through the life and innovations of refrigeration pioneer James Harrison.

I made a terrible blunder in a recent column (June 2018) when I referred to the Scotsborn refrigeration pioneer James Harrison as “William.” There’s really no excuse and I should know better. Harrison was born in Scotland in 1816, in the village of Bonhill, which is about 20 miles from my home, although he emigrated to Australia at the age of 21 and carved out three careers there; in journalism, local politics and the development of mechanical refrigeration.

Bonhill sits on the east bank of the River Leven, which connects Loch Lomond with the River Clyde. The Leven is only 6 miles (10 km) long but it is one of the fastest flowing rivers in Scotland with a mean flow rate of about 700,000 gpm (44 000 L/s). The village has existed since at least 1225 when it was a fording point on the cattle drovers’ road from Dumbarton to Stirling. In the late 18th century, in the early days of the industrial revolution, it became a center for textile finishing including bleaching, dyeing and printing, no doubt helped by the plentiful supply of clean, fast-flowing water.

James Harrison’s father (who was a William) was a fisherman in Bonhill but moved his family to Glasgow, the industrial center of the region and James attended the local Mechanics’ Institute there to train as a print compositor. Once qualified he moved to London at the age of 19 and a short time later, in 1837, he emigrated and found work with JP Fawkner at the offices of the Melbourne Advertiser. Fawkner instructed Harrison to set up of a sister paper, the Geelong Advertiser. Geelong was a port about 47 miles (75 km) south west of Melbourne and in 1840, when Harrison arrived there, the town had a population of 400 people, similar in size to Bonhill in those days. It’s now known as the City of Greater Geelong and has over 230,000 inhabitants (Bonhill has about 9,000).

It is said that his observation of the cooling effect of diethyl ether on the plates of the printing presses inspired Harrison to develop his ice-making machinery. Whatever the starting point, he remained an enthusiast for ether, despite its disadvantages, for the rest of his life.

He was not the first person to propose a closed cycle ice-making system but he has a strong claim to be the first to be commercially successful and was most probably not aware of the previous ideas of Oliver Evans and Jacob Perkins or the concurrent work of John Gorrie and Alexander Twining in the U.S. Harrison developed his machine in the early 1850s and brought his ideas back to London in 1856 where he attracted much attention from the scientific community, including Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution.

He linked with Daniel Siebe of London to commercialize his ideas, which included a high-pressure float valve as the expansion device, a shell-and-tube condenser and an air purge mechanism, which presumably was essential due to the operation of the system below atmospheric pressure and the extreme flammability of ether. He also proposed using his system as a heat pump for the distillation of essential oils; one of the first applications of heat pump technology.

After two years in London promoting his ice-making ideas Harrison returned to Australia and founded the Victoria Ice Works in Geelong in 1859. He continued as editor of the Geelong Advertiser until 1866 when the mounting costs of his technical developments pushed him into bankruptcy. From this point on, while others profited from his initial ideas and the refrigeration market blossomed, he took virtually no further part in it. He died, in poverty, in 1893 and his gravestone in Geelong carries the epitaph “One soweth—another reapeth.”