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.
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.
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.