My grandfather died about 25 years ago. He died after spending his whole working life in a company which was called Frigidaire. And before I go on, I must apologise if I have misspelt it. I understand the head office was in the States. I believe the company was swallowed up by another company, and this was part of the reason for my grandfather's early retirement at 62 or 3.
He was what was described to me as a refrigeration expert. He was an inventor and has at least a few patents for his work, but I think the company policy was to award the ownership of the patent to the company and not the inventor. - At least this is how I understood when my grandmother (his widow) explained it to me.
At that time I was a teenager and although I was interested in my grandfather's work, I was unable to understand much and I was of course too immature to make head or tail of the implications of his accomplishments. (Well that was me... perhaps others are more sensible in their teens)?
He had stacks of tools and gadgets and gizmos and he had a lot of old valve equipment. He was always making something.
I had just visited my grandmother a few years after my grandfather's death and she just happened to have been sorting through the various papers he had. On the table was a pile of documents from his old company and my grandmother told me that 'this one' was a patent for my grandfather's invention of a motor for a fridge which did not start with a surge. I understand this to mean that the motor he had invented, if put in a fridge, would not dim the lights when the thermostat kicked-in.
... And that conversation was over twenty years ago.
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Would this invention likely be a motor which would be interesting from the perspective of getting OU motors?
I have at various times made some attempts to lear what it was he invented, but I obviously barked up the wrong tree each time.
Just after he retired from GM Fri(d)gidaire, he became chronically ill. He was diagnosed with bronchial asthma. He was unable to become a freelance refrigeration technician as he planned. He died before he was seventy, and I had had no contact with him for five years as I had spent those five years traipsing over the globe with a rucksack. He died just two weeks before I returned to the UK.
Nipped in the bud so to speak.
But anyway. Can anyone assist me? And might this be interesting if found? Or is it something already used in some appliances?Statistics: Posted by mael — Sat Aug 23, 2008 1:27 pm
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