FROZEN MEAT TRADE.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume VII, Issue 2106, 28 September 1885, Page 2

FROZEN MEAT TRADE.

The following extract from the letter of the Home Correspondent of the Ofcago My Times will be read with interest I feel justified in saying that a new'te has arrived in' the frown meat "trade, |fc consequence of. the .admitted: success which has attended the experiments of Mr John Chambers in hia .neiy.system of cooling air for the preservation ol meat. It is three years since letters patent were issued to Mr Chambers, runh'olcjer, of Te Mata; Napier,'Kew'Zealaud,;for ''improvements in refrigerating and freezing, and in apparatus employed for Buch purposes," but it is only'now that the requisite apparatus and machinery • have been soperfected a3 to prove thatasyßtem has really beon brought into operation/ which can produce the desired result by* far less expensive process than those of"' Haslam, Bell-Coleman, and others. It is not my intentions to enter on the technical details of Mr Chamber's' invention, but I may briefly state that it is the adaptation of the American process for the producation of cold air, a process which has, of oourse, for long enough been in operation for the production of ice. ■ That the use of volatile liquids for the production of cold is more economical than that of air or any other process, has been'lon£( known, but it has been reserved for Mr Chambers to overcome the mechanical difficulties which have been hitherto regarded as insurmountable in their application to the production of cold air, and it is to be borne in tj&id that this apparatus of his is not amapne for producing refrigerating effect, button for merely applying the effect produced bee ammonia or other volatile liquids to the cooling or drying; of air. Briefly told, the result of the invention is that cold air can be produced at one-fourth the cost necessary for producing it under tK ordinary cold-air compression systeiiijL The final experiments have just applied to Mr Chambers' machine at thro insulated chambers of the London and St Katherine Docks Company, and the anticipated advantages of the ammonia process in connection with Mr Chambers' " cooler," have been exhaustively provod. The machines and cooler stand on an area of 306 superficial feet, and occupy a space ef 2295 cubic feet, and are calculated to maintain, at an average of 15 deg, .454 tons of mutton on an average consumptionofcoalfora voyage through the tropics of one ton per day.