---- Jim Felder <jim.felder@GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> Does anybody recall the Icy Ball ammonia refrigerators? You cooled your
> food using your kitchen stove. I have actually seen one! Google it. You had
> a "dumbbell" contraption with a pipe and orifice connecting two spheres
> with ammonia inside. You put one sphere into a pot of boiling water until
> the ammonia boiled off. The you would open the lid of a specially designed
> cabinet, with one sphere inside and the other sphere outside. The one that
> got cold went inside. When the process had stopped, you repeated the
> boil-off.
>
> Just one simple step below a dometic.

http://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grosser_and_his_sustainable_fridge.html

That is just one of many, many Google hits.  Many years ago, when I was just out of college and teaching high school, a student at the school built a chiller that was essentially an "Icy Ball," and it worked.  We did not allow him to demonstrate it for more than a few seconds of warming in hot water without heat added, because he had no means of controlling pressure except the condensation on the down side, but it did drop the temperature.

Paul Theroux wrote a brilliant novel, _The Mosquito Coast_, which later became a movie.  In it the main character built a giant absorption freezer in the wilds of Central America to take ice to the indigenous people.  It is a good read, both an adventure story and a serious observation on politics, misdirected genius, and human relations.

mcneely

>
> Jim
>
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 8:04 AM, george jannini <georgejoann@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> >    Chilling foodstuffs using heated ammonia is magic, pure and simple, much
> > like producing voices or music by manipulating 0s & 1s.  F.M., we old time
> > tip & ringers used to call it it was and is the stuff of layoffs.
> >
> >   I kneel to the Dometic gods as I perform the lighting ritual whilst
> > reciting the litany, or should I say, mutter dire imprecations and threats.
> >
> > Geo/atl
> >

--
David McNeely