Image source: http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2701/4504525213_117197532d_z.jpg
Growth and success continued until in the 70s when the competition and cost of production made GE half with Frigidaire selling it to White Consolidated Industries who kept the name and continue to supply the Frigidaire range of household appliances.
Frigidaire started life as the Guardian Refrigerator Company which was founded in 1916 by a group of buyers and an engineer called Alfred Mellowes from Fort Wayne in Indiana. Alfred had spent the previous year working on constructing a refrigerator in his wash house and produced the first self contained unit. This refrigerator was more like todays as it had a compressor fixed solidly in the base of the machine, unlike all previous machines which had a separate cold box and a cooler unit that was then attached to it. The factory they set up hand made these refrigerators and this took up two weeks per machine and they were soon in serious financial trouble. It is estimated that in a two year period only 40 machines were built and the corporation was over $30,000 in debt.
General motors stepped in and bought the corporation in 1918 and changed its name to Frigidaire and set about adapting their knowledge of production manufacturing to making refrigerators at a plant in Detroit. This resulted in being able to quickly manufacture a quality product at a reasonable value and by September that year they had refrigerators for sale in the stores. In 1919 with all of the patents for this design acquired the corporation became the Frigidaire Corporation. In 1921 production was moved to Dayton in Ohio sharing a factory with a subsidiary of General Electric that produced electrical generators. By 1926 the refrigerator business was doing so well that it was made a separate subsidiary of GE with its own president Elmer G Biechler and moved into a large purpose built plant in Moraine in Ohio. Production of other cooling products was also introduced with drinks coolers, ice cream makers, cooled display cabinets and soda fountain machines being made and in 1929 air conditioners and freezers were sold for the first time. Another milestone in the corporation history was the completion of the only millionth refrigerator in the same year.
The 1930s saw two new foremost technical advances and these were the development of a new refrigerant they called Freon and the introduction of a more efficient sealed compressor called the Meter Miser. Frigidaire was one of only a few companies that actually continued to grow and prosper during the depression branching into other household appliances such as washers, dryers, ovens and heaters. Just before the outbreak of World War II some 20,000 people were employed by the corporation which also had the largest refrigerator factory in the world.
