If you lived in ancient Persia, you could do a lot worse in trying to cool things down than by building a yakhchāl. Today we break down how the early fridges worked.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, Jerry, sitting in for Dave. And so this is Short Stuff, the How Do You Say This Again edition.
Yeah, I'm going to say it's spelled Y-A-K-H, you know, as most words are. C-H-A-A-L. I'm going to say YAKALS.
I'm going with the straight ahead yak chals. All right. Okay. So you say it your way throughout. I'll say it my way. And I'm sure I'll inevitably unconsciously start saying it your way.
We'll see. But what we're talking about is the promise from our refrigeration episode a little bit more on these ancient – basically ancient refrigerators or cooling systems. They were found across ancient Persia at least as old as 400 B.C. This is modern-day Iran.
And this is – these are places where, believe it or not, the climate enables freezing of ice when you would not think you should be able to freeze ice.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And apparently still today in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, Tajikistan. Yeah, I said it right the first time. They call the refrigerators yakchals, which is how I would say it if I were in Iran. But that's the name for the fridge, which means that at some point someone in Iran has gone into a store and said, you got a smeg yakchal?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And these have been the fascination of like everyone from engineers to historians to physicists over the years because they're just so kind of confusing and how they actually work. And I'm still not entirely sure how it works. It seems to be a little magic involved.
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