Timeline of low-temperature technology facts for kids

This article is about the amazing history of how people learned to make things super cold! It covers everything from ancient ways of storing ice to modern machines that can reach temperatures colder than anything in space. You'll learn about the clever inventions and scientific discoveries that made it possible to keep food fresh, create air conditioning, and even explore the strange world of cryogenics – the study of extremely low temperatures, sometimes as cold as -273.15 °C (which is 0 Kelvin, the lowest possible temperature!). We'll also look at how we learned to measure temperature and understand how heat works.

Early Discoveries (Before the 1800s)

• Around 1700 BC – A ruler named Zimri-Lim in Syria built one of the first ice houses. These were special buildings designed to store ice.
• Around 500 BC – The yakhchal was an ancient Persian "ice pit." It was a dome-shaped building made of special mud that kept heat out. Snow and ice were stored underground, allowing people to have ice even in hot weather for keeping food fresh. Sometimes, a wind catcher (called a badgir) was used with it to help keep it cool.
• Around 60 AD – Hero of Alexandria understood that air expands when it gets warm and shrinks when it gets cold. He showed this with a tube of air in water. This idea was a first step towards understanding how gases behave with temperature, which led to the first thermometers.
• 1396 AD – In Korea, large ice storage buildings called "Dong-bing-go" and "Seo-bing-go" were built in Seoul. They stored ice collected from the frozen Han River. These well-insulated buildings provided ice to the royal families all summer long.
• 1593 – Galileo Galilei created an early version of a thermoscope, which could show changes in temperature.
• Around 1611-1613 – Francesco Sagredo or Santorio Santorio added a numerical scale to a thermoscope, making it more like a thermometer.
• 1638 – Robert Fludd described a thermometer with a scale, using air and water.
• 1650 – Otto von Guericke built the world's first vacuum pump. He used it to create a vacuum, showing that a space with no air could exist.
• 1662 – Boyle's law was shown using a vacuum pump. This law explains how the pressure and volume of a gas are related.
• 1665 – Robert Boyle thought about the idea of a "minimum temperature" in his writings.
• 1702 – Guillaume Amontons used his air thermometer to estimate absolute zero (the coldest possible temperature) to be around -240 °C. He believed that at this point, a gas would have no volume or pressure.
• 1714 – Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit invented the first reliable thermometer using mercury.
• 1724 – Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit introduced the Fahrenheit temperature scale.
• 1742 – Anders Celsius proposed a temperature scale where 0 degrees was the boiling point of water and 100 degrees was the freezing point. Later, this was flipped to become the Celsius scale we use today.
• 1755 – William Cullen used a pump to create a partial vacuum over a container of diethyl ether. The ether boiled and absorbed heat from the air, making the air colder.
• 1756 – William Cullen gave the first public demonstration of making cold artificially.
• 1782 – Antoine Lavoisier and Pierre-Simon Laplace invented the ice-calorimeter, a device to measure heat changes using ice.
• 1784 – Gaspard Monge was the first to turn a gas (liquid sulfur dioxide) into a liquid.
• 1787 – Charles's law was discovered, explaining the relationship between the volume and temperature of a gas.

The 1800s: Machines and Major Discoveries

• 1802 – John Dalton wrote about how all gases could be turned into liquids.
• 1802 – Gay-Lussac's law was developed, linking the temperature and pressure of a gas.
• 1805 – Oliver Evans designed the first closed-circuit refrigeration machine.
• 1809 – Jacob Perkins received a patent for a refrigerating machine.
• 1810 – John Leslie froze water into ice using an air pump.
• 1823 – Michael Faraday made ammonia liquid to create cooling.
• 1824 – Sadi Carnot described the Carnot Cycle, a theoretical engine that showed the maximum efficiency for converting heat into work.
• 1834 – Jacob Perkins got the first patent for a vapor-compression refrigeration system, which is similar to how many refrigerators work today.
• 1834 – Jean-Charles Peltier discovered the Peltier effect, where an electric current can create a temperature difference.
• 1851 – John Gorrie patented his mechanical refrigeration machine in the US. He used it to make ice and cool air.
• 1852 – James Prescott Joule and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) discovered the Joule–Thomson effect. This effect explains how a gas cools down when it expands without doing any work.
• 1856 – James Harrison patented a refrigeration system using ether. He built the first practical ice-making and refrigeration room for breweries and meat packers in Australia.
• 1857 – Rudolf Clausius developed a detailed theory of gases, including how they behave at different temperatures.
• 1859 – James Clerk Maxwell figured out how the speeds of gas particles are distributed. This helped explain temperature and heat and was a big step in statistical mechanics.
• 1859 – Ferdinand Carré invented the first gas absorption refrigeration system, using ammonia dissolved in water.
• 1862 – Alexander Carnegie Kirk invented the Air cycle machine, another type of refrigeration system.
• 1864 – Charles Tellier patented a refrigeration system using dimethyl ether.
• 1867 – Thaddeus S. C. Lowe patented a refrigeration system using carbon dioxide. He later used this technology to transport frozen meat by ship.
• 1869 – Thomas Andrews discovered the critical point in fluids. This is a specific temperature and pressure where a liquid and gas become indistinguishable.
• 1871 – Carl von Linde built his first ammonia compression machine.
• Around 1873 – Van der Waals proposed a model for "real gases" (not ideal ones) that became known as the Van der Waals equation.
• 1876 – Carl von Linde patented equipment to turn air into liquid using the Joule-Thomson expansion process and regenerative cooling.
• 1877 – Raoul Pictet and Louis Paul Cailletet, working separately, found ways to make oxygen liquid.
• 1883 – Zygmunt Wróblewski successfully made useful amounts of liquid oxygen.
• 1885 – Zygmunt Wróblewski published important information about hydrogen, including its critical temperature and boiling point.
• 1892 – James Dewar invented the Dewar flask, also known as a thermos. This special bottle has a vacuum layer to keep liquids hot or cold for a long time.
• 1895 – Carl von Linde applied for a patent for the Hampson–Linde cycle, a method for making liquid air or other gases.
• 1898 – James Dewar made liquid hydrogen using regenerative cooling and his vacuum flask.

The 1900s: Superconductivity and Modern Cooling

• 1905 – Carl von Linde successfully obtained pure liquid oxygen and nitrogen.
• 1906 – Willis Carrier patented the basic ideas for modern air conditioning.
• 1908 – Heike Kamerlingh Onnes made helium liquid. This was a huge step because helium has a very low boiling point.
• 1911 – Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered superconductivity. This is a amazing phenomenon where certain materials lose all electrical resistance when cooled to very low temperatures.
• 1922 – Baltzar von Platen and Carl Munters invented a special type of refrigerator that uses heat to cool things down, called a 3-fluid absorption chiller.
• 1926 – Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd invented the Einstein refrigerator, which had no moving parts.
• 1926 – Willem Hendrik Keesom managed to solidify helium, turning it into a solid.
• 1926 – General Electric Company introduced the first refrigerator with a sealed compressor, making home refrigerators more reliable.
• 1929 – David Forbes Keith received a patent for the Icy Ball, a simple refrigeration device that helped many families during tough economic times.
• 1933 – William Giauque and others developed Adiabatic demagnetization refrigeration, a method to reach very low temperatures by changing magnetic fields.
• 1937 – Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, John F. Allen, and Don Misener discovered superfluidity using helium-4. Superfluidity is a strange state where a liquid flows without any friction.
• 1951 – Heinz London came up with the idea for the dilution refrigerator, which is used to reach extremely low temperatures.
• 1965 – Scientists discovered that helium-3 can dissolve in helium-4 even at 0 Kelvin.
• 1966 – The continuous dilution refrigerator was developed, allowing for ongoing super-cooling.
• 1972 – David Lee, Robert Coleman Richardson and Douglas Osheroff discovered superfluidity in helium-3 at even colder temperatures (0.002 K). They later won a Nobel Prize for this.
• 1973 – The Linear compressor was invented, a more efficient type of compressor for refrigerators.
• 1978 – Laser cooling was shown for the first time. This technique uses lasers to slow down and cool atoms to incredibly low temperatures.
• 1983 – The orifice-type pulse tube refrigerator was invented, a simpler way to achieve cryogenic temperatures.
• 1986 – Karl Alexander Müller and J. Georg Bednorz discovered high-temperature superconductivity. This was a big breakthrough because it meant some materials could become superconductors at higher (though still very cold) temperatures.
• 1995 – Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman created the first Bose–Einstein condensate. This is a special state of matter that occurs when atoms are cooled to near absolute zero, behaving like one giant wave. They won the Nobel Prize for this in 2001.
• 1999 – Scientists reached a new world record for the lowest temperature: 100 picokelvins (0.000 000 000 1 Kelvin) by cooling the nuclear spins in a piece of rhodium metal.

The 2000s: Pushing the Limits of Cold

• 2000 – Even colder nuclear spin temperatures (below 100 pK) were reported in Finland. This was the temperature of a specific quantum property, not the overall temperature of the material.
• 2014 – Scientists in Italy cooled a large copper vessel (one cubic meter) to 0.006 K for 15 days. This set a record for the lowest temperature achieved in such a large space.
• 2015 – Researchers at MIT successfully cooled molecules of sodium potassium gas to 500 nanokelvins, hoping to create an exotic state of matter.
• 2015 – A team at Stanford University used a special technique to cool rubidium atoms to an effective temperature of 50 pK in two dimensions.
• 2017 – The Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) was developed to be launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2018. This instrument creates extremely cold conditions in space, leading to Bose-Einstein Condensates that are even colder than those made on Earth. This could help scientists explore new quantum mechanical phenomena and test fundamental laws of physics.

Images for kids

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  A friendly robot to guide you through the world of cold!

See also

In Spanish: Anexo:Cronología de la tecnología de bajas temperaturas para niños