Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 August 1879 — A Valuable Invention. [ARTICLE]

A Valuable Invention.

Invention is stimulated by need, and when the world wants anything, suitable contrivances and appliances for supplying it are not long lacking. The transportation of live and dead meat from the New to the Old World has rapidly grown into a very important business, and the ocean steamship refrigerator has been so improved that it was thought nothing more could be added. But now we learn that a Mr. Coleman. -of Glasgow, Scotland, has invented a process of producing a low temperature in sea-going vessels without the use of ice or any chemical agency whatever, whereby an unlimited amount of cold can be manufactured on shipboard by the purely mechanical process of compressing and expanding ordinary air. The inventor first made a convincing test on the Circassia of the Anchor Line. On the 16th of last month this vessel landed

at Glasgow a consignment of meat, consisting of 1,216 quarters of beef ana 250 carcasses of mutton, which had been kept by this process at a uniform temperature of about 38 deg. Fahr, throughout the voyage. The machinery on board the Circassia is capable of discharging 500 cubic feet of air cooled to 40 deg. or 50 deg. Fahr, per minute; an amount found in practice to be sufficient for keeping at 36 deg. Fahr, a chamber of 16,000 cubic feet measurement, with an external temperature of 60 deg. to 80 deg. The London Times asserts that Mr. Eastman, of New York, has arranged with the patentees for using their apparatus in connection with his gigantic trade; also that the United States have sent a commission to examine, with the view of utilizing the invention in Southern refrigerating vessels to prevent the spread of yellow fever. The English War Office and the India Office are also investigating the process with a view to the supply of cool, pure air for barracks, hospitals, and other such buildings. In fact, the uses to Which such a valuable invention can be put cannot now be forecast. To mitigate, for instance, tl]e tropical heats of voyages through the Dead Sea to Africa, etc., such a process must prove of inestimable benefit. By this new process ice is altogether dispensed with, and hence the transportation of dead meat becomes safer, easier, and more economical. If all that is claimed for it become true, we may shortly expect a very rapid inreease in the meat-transportation trade.