Home icebox

For centuries people have sought different methods of storing food, which led to the building of the first ice boxes. Vienna is considered the cradle of the first refrigeration devices. A room icebox is a kind of a furniture cupboard cooled with ice. In the upper part of the device, in a fixed, specially insulated container, a block of ice was placed. Instead of a bottom the container has a grille around which a gutter is placed, into which the water from the melting ice flowed. The temperature in the icebox was usually between 8 and 11°C and it took between 8 and 15 kg of ice per day to keep the food inside the icebox fresh. In the winter, ice was cut out of rivers or lakes and was stored for the summer months in specially prepared buildings called ice stores. Manufacturer: Hugo Hohner, Kühlanlagen u. Eiskästen – Fabrik Wien, early 20th c. Inv. No.: MIM71/IX-1 Model prepared on the basis of photogrammetric measurements Licence: CC BY-NC-SA