Frigidaire 🇺🇸

Frigidaire is the name that in the United States eventually came to designate any refrigerator —and probably the origin of the word “fridge”—. It was founded in 1916 in Fort Wayne (Indiana) as Guardian Frigerator Company, when engineer Alfred Mellowes, with Nathaniel Wales, built one of the first autonomous electric refrigerators. William C. Durant, founder of General Motors, invested in 1918, gave it the name Frigidaire in 1919 and integrated it into GM, which in 1921 moved it to Dayton (Ohio) under the subsidiary Delco‑Light and the tutelage of Charles F. Kettering. With mass production the price dropped to 468 dollars in 1926 and in 1929 the refrigerator number one million was released.

That same year, 1929, Frigidaire introduced the “Room Cooler,” the first air conditioner designed for a single room: a split system with an indoor unit that looked like a console radio and a remote condenser unit cooled by water that had to be connected to the building’s water supply and drain. It was heavy and expensive—not a realistic option for most homes—but it paved the way that GE, Carrier, and others would follow. And in 1930, with Kettering and Thomas Midgley Jr., the Frigidaire and GM laboratory discovered freon, the safe refrigerant that replaced sulfur dioxide and methyl formate and made the window unit possible.

In the 1930s it added stoves, heaters, and washing machines; in 1941 it boasted “the largest refrigerator factory in the world,” with more than six million produced, and during the war it manufactured over 200,000 Browning machine guns. The post‑war period was its heyday: automatic ice makers (1952), color‑coordinated appliances (1954), the “Sheer Look” design (1956) and a range of window units with unmistakable names: the “Super Meter‑Miser” with alternating compressor since 1956, the sturdy “Heavy Duty Imperial,” the “Custom DeLuxe,” the 1966 “Prestige” series sold as “pin‑silence,” the “Easy‑Mount” of 1970, and the “Total Environment” of 1976. Until the 1960s it used Frigidaire compressors; later Tecumseh and Copeland arrived.

The competition from imports and the price war caused it to lose about 40 million on 450 million in sales in 1978, and in January 1979 General Motors sold Frigidaire to White Consolidated Industries of Cleveland for about 120 million dollars. The 1980 range was the first line of Frigidaire appliances actually manufactured by WCI. In 1986 the Swedish Electrolux bought WCI for 742 million, invested more than 650 million in factories, relaunched the brand in 1991 and in 1997 created Frigidaire Home Products. Today, based in Charlotte (North Carolina), Frigidaire continues selling window appliances in North America, with the anecdote that its great rivals of yesteryear — Kelvinator, Gibson, Philco International, White‑Westinghouse — ended up in the same group.

Pending verification

Capacity, price and refrigerant of the 1929 Room Cooler, and the exact date of the closure of the Dayton/Moraine plants.

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