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This Day in History — Thomas Elkins Patents an Ingenious Refrigerating Apparatus

On this day in 1879

On November 4, 1879, Albany's Thomas Elkins won a patent for a refrigerator cooled by wet clay and cloth instead of ice, meant for food and for the dead.

The Off-Key Bard enters a workshop in Albany, New York, in the autumn of 1879. There is no electrical outlet, no humming compressor, and no white refrigerator standing against the wall. Instead, a doctor and inventor is studying a box of unglazed clay, wrapped in damp cloth and standing in a trough of water. Its purpose is simple enough: keep perishable things cool for longer. The method rests on a quiet understanding of how water and heat interact.

"Sometimes the most useful inventions don't require a new source of power. They require a better understanding of the physical world."

On November 4, 1879, Thomas Elkins, a Black physician, pharmacist, dentist and abolitionist of Albany, was granted U.S. Patent No. 221,222 for an "Improvement in Refrigerating Apparatus." It used no ice, no motor and no compressor. It cooled by evaporation, and its patent named two uses: preserving food and preserving "human corpses." The story of the man behind it is larger than one patent.

Keeping Things Cold Before the Refrigerator

Before mechanical refrigeration, people relied on salting, drying, smoking, cool cellars and winter ice stored in icehouses. Refrigeration came out of long experimentation, and many inventors contributed. The Smithsonian's American History Museum, for example, holds the patent model for John Gorrie's compressed-air ice machine, patented in 1851 and described by the museum as the first U.S. patent for a mechanical refrigerating or ice-making machine. Machines like that were expensive and demanding, which left room for simpler, cheaper ideas.

A Doctor in Albany

Elkins was born in 1818 or 1819. Accounts differ on the exact year, and his monument at Albany Rural Cemetery reads "1818–1900." He trained for roughly a decade under a pharmacist, studied dentistry under a dentist who practiced in Albany and Montreal, and studied surgery under local doctors. One account names Dr. Alden March, a founder of Albany Medical College. He ran a drugstore on North Swan Street and later at Broadway and Livingston Avenue, and also practiced dentistry and minor surgery. The 1881 Albany Handbook listed him as a "district physician," and he also served as a doctor for the Albany City Jail.

The Vigilance Committee

Elkins was also part of Albany's antislavery network. BlackPast says he joined the Albany Vigilance Committee in the 1840s and served as its secretary in the 1850s. The committee gave freedom seekers food, clothing, money, legal help and temporary shelter. He served on it alongside Stephen Myers, and one local history says he lived a few doors from Stephen and Harriet Myers on Lumber Street. The same source calls it "more than likely" that his medical training helped people in flight, an inference and not a documented fact.

During the Civil War, Massachusetts Governor John Andrew appointed him medical examiner for recruits to the 54th and 55th Massachusetts regiments. After the war he traveled, including to Liberia, possibly in connection with the Back to Africa movement. One source hedges that part.

Inventor of Practical Things

Elkins held three patents. U.S. Patent No. 100,020, dated February 22, 1870, covered a dining table whose top came apart into pieces, so that it could also serve as an ironing table or, with rollers fitted, as a quilting frame. U.S. Patent No. 122,518, issued January 9, 1872, covered a "chamber commode" that combined a bureau, mirror, book rack, washstand, table, easy chair and chamber stool into a multifunctional piece of furniture. Both inventions combined several household jobs in one object, which may be why they look odd to us now.

How the Apparatus Worked

The refrigerator patent was filed on July 15, 1879, and granted on November 4. It describes a "chilling box" made of unglazed earthenware "porous in all its parts," like the clay used for drain tiles and flowerpots. Its cover is also unglazed earthenware with one or more perforations. A layer of absorbent cloth, called bibulous material in the patent, covers the box's outer sides and top. The cloth's lower edges dip into a water trough that surrounds the box's base, and the box rests on those edges. Water is poured into the trough through a funnel and conduit.

The cloth draws water up from the trough, and the water spreads over the box. Some drains back, and some evaporates. Evaporation takes heat from the box and whatever is inside it. Food or other goods sit on a wire grating in a perforated bottom, a few inches off the floor, and air circulates slightly through the bottom and the opening in the cover. A casing of sheet metal or wood surrounds the whole apparatus so that room air does not disturb the cooling.

That is the same principle by which sweat cools skin. It also explains why a design like this works best in dry air and poorly in humid air.

Some popular accounts, including BlackPast and several biography sites, say Elkins's refrigerator circulated chilled water or coolant through metal coils. The patent text does not support that. It mentions no ice, no coils and no mechanical refrigeration, and the patent text and the summaries of it describe an evaporative design.

What He Actually Claimed

Elkins did not claim to have discovered evaporative cooling. His patent says plainly that chilling things in a porous box by wetting its outer surface is "old and well-known." What he claimed was a specific combination: detachable side sections for the box, lined on the outside with the absorbent material down to the bottom of the sides, working together with the trough and the cover. A second claim added the outer shell, the perforated bottom and the grating.

Many patents work this way. They do not invent a new phenomenon. They arrange a known one into a device that is easier to build, clean or use.

Food, and the Dead

The patent's opening names its targets: "articles liable to decay, or articles for food, or human corpses." Keeping a body cool before burial was a real problem in warm weather, and a doctor would have known it. The patent does not say what led Elkins to include it, and it would be wrong to guess at a personal motive.

The Model That Survives

A patent model of the apparatus survives and is documented online. One catalog entry describes a metal body with a ceramic interior, a decorative top, a funnel-like spout and a wooden base with eighteen holes in its bottom.

Whether the apparatus was ever widely made or sold is unclear. The surviving record does not show it, so it would be wrong to say it led to the household refrigerator. Modern refrigerators work by a different mechanism, a compressed refrigerant cycle, and they are not descended from this device.

Finding Elkins Again

Elkins died on August 10, 1900, and is buried in Albany Rural Cemetery. His house site has since become part of efforts to investigate and preserve Albany's Underground Railroad history. In 2017, the University at Albany announced an archaeological field school examining properties associated with Elkins and Stephen and Harriet Myers. In 2022, the Underground Railroad Education Center sponsored a community excavation at Elkins's former property, including plans to investigate a water cistern and foundation wall.

With clay and cloth and water's flow,
He found a way to keep things low.
Where heat once hastened food's decay,
His clever craft drew warmth away.

The patent granted on November 4, 1879, was not the invention of refrigeration. People had been using ice, evaporation and other cooling techniques long before Elkins was born. It was also not an early electric refrigerator. It was a carefully arranged evaporative cooler built from clay, cloth, water and moving air.

That makes it more interesting, not less. Elkins took a known principle and designed a specific, practical device around it, and he told the patent office exactly which part was his. The same man treated patients, belonged to a committee that helped people flee slavery, and designed furniture and coolers for ordinary life. His story belongs to the history of technology and to the history of the fight against slavery, and neither half should crowd out the other.

Sources

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