INVENTOR OF COLD STORAGE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVI, Issue 1191, 3 January 1914, Page 4

INVENTOR OF COLD STORAGE.

DIES IN DESTITUTION. RESULTS'©* HIS EXPERIMENTS. M. Cbailes Tellier, the inventor of cold storage,who has been for 3 ears past living on the verge of destitution, died last week in his small flat at Auteil, Paris, after a long illness. He derived but scant advantage from his discoveries, and although some nine months ago a great banquet was given in his honour by members of the Cold Storage Congress, and a public subscription for his benefit was opened, be died almost as poor as he had been living for the past quarter of a century. Even the ,£4OOO subscribed for him by the public of South America failed to reach him before his death. Chailes Louis Tellier was boru at Amiens in 1838, and at the age of 20, lie came to Paris to complete bis studies. He took to the engineering profession msi, and then to chemistry and soon became absorbed in the study of the cold storage problem which was already mooted at the time. His first satisfactory results were obtained about iB6O, but it was difficult for him to obtain a hearing before scientific bodies. In 1868 be attempted to send the first consignment of meat in cold storage to South America. The method was based on his new process of dry cold, and was only partially successful owing to defective installation. His experiments found a practical outcome in 1876, when the first experimental cargo of frozen meat left France for Buenos Aires in Le Frigorifique, which had been built under bis direction with cold storage apartments. M. Tellier continued to improve his methods, and they were finally adopted by great meat exporting firms in North and South America aud in Australia and New Zealand, but without the slightest profit to the original inventor. Although the cold storage trade within the last decade or so rose to hundreds of millions of pounds, it completely ignored M. Tellier until attention to his privations and poverty was called about 14 months ago. A correspondent writes to the Times; “At the present day cold storage has not only changed completely the set of the world’s food trade, but has deeply affected the economic development of many impoitant nations. Its effect is nowhere more clearly shown than in the figures for the importation into this country of frozen aud chilled meat. In 1912, for example, the value of the beef, mutton and lamb which was received here from abroad was Although Le Frigorifique was M, Tellier’s finest achievement, he did not cease, from the early sixties on to his death, to apply ail bis forces to the advancement of that scientific knowledge on which practical refrigeration depends- His two books, written in very early years, “La Froid Applique a la Biere’ and ‘La Conservation de la Viande par la Froid,’laid the foundation of our knowledge of cold storage, aud they have been followed by numerous other publications aud papers, setting forth, as he made them the results of his researches.”