Albert Einstein

It’s hard to imagine the genius behind the Theory of Relativity tinkering with something as mundane as a kitchen appliance, but Albert Einstein did just that in 1926, when he began collaborating on a design for a refrigerator. Einstein was inspired to make the device after reading a news story about a Berlin family who had been killed by poisonous fumes leaking from their fridge. Along with fellow physicist Leo Szilard, he developed a safer absorption refrigerator that used no moving parts or electricity. Instead, it employed a small heat source and a cocktail of ammonia, butane and water to create a cooling chemical reaction. Einstein and Szilard received a patent for their fridge in 1930. While it was largely ignored during their lifetimes, recent research suggests that similar coolers might be an eco-friendly alternative to modern refrigerators that use freon.