# Old advert of fridge- what's this mean?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/old-advert-of-fridge-whats-this-mean/757944>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [June 21, 2016, 4:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/old-advert-of-fridge-whats-this-mean/757944 "2016-06-21T04:53:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\
**Post date:** [June 22, 2016, 5:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/old-advert-of-fridge-whats-this-mean/757944/21 "2016-06-22T05:36:13Z")

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> [@Johnny\_L.A](#):
>
> [Obligatory _The Far Side_ cartoon](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/73/90/2a/73902af86e69ff0ae60476a7486a6eb6.jpg)

Or the cartoon I saw, in the days of our war in Afghanistan (sorry, can’t find it on-line now), titled “Sighting on the road to Kabul”: Shows Al Qaeda military truck with side-view mirror clearly shown, with label “Objects in Mirror are closer than they look”. Seen in the mirror is a U. S. helicopter gunship bearing down on them.

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**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\
**Post date:** [June 22, 2016, 3:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/old-advert-of-fridge-whats-this-mean/757944/22 "2016-06-22T15:58:16Z")

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What I found most interesting was that it was clearly an icebox (with a hunk of ice at the top) and called a refrigerator. My grandmother had an icebox till after the war, but no one called it a refrigerator.

A real nostalgia trip. And $10 in 1900 is probably more like several hundred today. Henry Ford scandalized his competitors by paying his workers $5/day, probably double what they did.

Another example. My father worked for a radio store in the mid 1920s and he told of enthusiast’s coming in with their weekly pay envelope with maybe $10-$12 in it, taking out 60 c. for carfare (6 days a week, two nickel fares a day) and another 60 c. for 6 lunches and leaving the rest as a layaway. These were kids living with their parents.

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**Author:** ![UDS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecae2f/32.png) [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)\
**Post date:** [June 23, 2016, 1:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/old-advert-of-fridge-whats-this-mean/757944/23 "2016-06-23T01:07:05Z")

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> [@Hari\_Seldon](#):
>
> What I found most interesting was that it was clearly an icebox (with a hunk of ice at the top) and called a refrigerator. My grandmother had an icebox till after the war, but no one called it a refrigerator.

_Refrigerator_, as a device for absorbing or dissipating heat, goes back to the early eighteenth century; apothecaries, brewers and others used them. For the domestic appliance, the term is in use from the early nineteenth century, and of course referred to ice-boxes (and ice-houses). Until electrical refrigerators became relatively common, I don’t think the term was confined to them.

So, your grandmother might not have called her icebox a refrigerator, but _her_ grandmother might have done.

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