The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Abbé · The refrigerator’s actual inventor
On the record
The first GE home refrigerators — built in Fort Wayne and sold from 1911 at about $1,000 — were made from his patented design. GE manufactured Audiffren machines here from 1911 to 1928.
So the city’s claim is manufacture, not invention: “Fort Wayne invented the refrigerator, in 1913” is a misidentification in “Fort Wayne invented the refrigerator, in 1913.”; the defensible claim is the first American manufacture of a practical domestic electric refrigerator.
Audiffren was a Cistercian abbot who also taught physics, and he first designed his machine to cool wine for his monks. He patented the design in France in 1894 and took out United States patents in 1895 (No. 551,107) and 1908 (No. 898,400, with the manufacturer Albert Singrün). The machine — a hermetically sealed, rotating sulfur-dioxide unit nicknamed the "dumbbell" — was the first practical design of its kind for household refrigeration.
His American patents were bought by C. A. Griscom for the American Audiffren Refrigerating Machine Company, and the H. W. Johns-Manville Company, which held the United States rights, contracted General Electric to manufacture the Audiffren-Singrün machine at Fort Wayne. GE built its first Audiffren refrigerator in Fort Wayne in 1911; the units sold for about $1,000, roughly twice the price of an automobile. Fort Wayne's work on the design fed directly into GE's hermetically sealed Monitor Top refrigerator, and two men from GE's Fort Wayne plant, Reuben Bechtold and the engineer Alfred Mellowes, carried the idea on to found the company that became Frigidaire.
Find them on this page
From “Fort Wayne invented the refrigerator, in 1913.” in § 03: Assembly Magazine, GE appliance centenary; GE photo record; Wikipedia, "Marcel Audiffren"; Refrigeration Research, "The Dumbbell" (refresearch.com); General Electric photograph caption, Épinal, August 1911, via Google Arts & Culture.