To Bridge the Hemispheres: Nineteenth-Century Refrigerators and Technological Precarity in Colonial Australasia

In the 1870s, efforts to apply novel refrigeration technology to colonial trade routes were plagued by technological failure. Mechanical breakage was commonplace: New Zealand’s first attempt to ship frozen mutton to Britain failed when a crankshaft on the SS Dunedin’s refrigerating engine broke during the loading of the cargo. Even where the machinery functioned properly, frozen cargo was always vulnerable to the vicissitudes of climate, on land (especially in the Australian colonies) and at sea, where languishing in the tropics risked spoiling a ship’s cargo. The technology promised to make “climate, seasons, plenty, scarcity, [and] distance...all shake hands,” according to an early Australian booster, but well into the 1880s, its application proceeded by fits and starts. The intra-imperial application of refrigeration technology was intended “to bridge the hemispheres” and to “arrest the arrow of time,” as one British dignitary put it at the Fourth International Congress on Refrigeration in 1924, but in practice it was surprisingly fallible. Nowhere was this more apparent than in colonial Australasia.

This paper examines the development and early application of refrigeration technology, arguing against the origin stories of unhampered progress which came to dominate discourse around refrigeration by the early twentieth century. By approaching the history of this technology and its commercial application from the ground level, the fits and starts of the first years of its application, and the controversies that surrounded it, come to light. Recovering such nuances demonstrate the significance of the colonial milieu as a challenge to the scientific confidence that imbued nineteenth-century technology like the refrigerator, and reveals how the precarity of the technology (rather than its power or potential) was its defining feature.