According to the comment below the previous post about Steam engine - James Watt introduced some crucial improvements to steam engine and because of that he is said to be the one who started the Industrial age. Maybe that's why he comes to your mind when You think about the steam engine.
Refirigerator:
Before the invention of refrigerator people used icehouses to storage food for the most of the day. Basically it was a hole below the ground level filled with snow and ice where you store food to keep it fresh for longer. The first who invented something like refrigerator was professor William Cullen in 1755. He used a pump to create a partial vacuum over a container of diethyl ether, which then boiled, absorbing heat from the surrounding air. This experiment created a small amount of ice but have no practical usage at that time. In 1805 Oliver Evans described a closed vapor-compression refrigeration cycle for the production of ice. Thanks to the British scientist Michael Faraday (the same one who is known from his Faraday cage) who liquified ammonia and other gases by using high pressures and low temperatures in 1820, 14 years later Jacob Perkins invented the first vapor-compression refrigerator system which could operate continously. The refrigerators for home and domestic use was created in 1913. The first company that succeed in commercialising fridges was Electrolux.
Scheme of refrigerator:
But even when fridges were used on a large scale, ice in huge blocks was stored is special places in the ground. I remember a place close to my home: a hole the size of the foundation of a block of flats, about seven metres deep, filled with ice layered with straw. Whether the ice was used for drinks in summer or to cool other things, I don't know.
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