On a related note, there is a reasonably well known commentary on an adjacent technology by Ruth Schwartz Cowan (1985) titled "How The Refrigerator Got Its Hum". It describes a 1930s market battle between heat-driven ad/absorption chiller technology ("Kelvinator") and work-driven compressor chiller technology ("GE"). Tl;DR GE won.

The ab-chiller is likely best known these days as the "propane fridge" in RVs.

Sadly, the only online resources for Cowan's work I can find are either Scribd paywalled [1], the entire book in which Cowan's piece is a chapter on the Internet Archive [2] or a pointer-to-a-pointer from a piece in the Guardian [3] to a boingboing piece [4] that seems to be offline.

(Background: I work in Direct-Use geothermal. Such ad/absorption chillers are one major tool in the toolbox for low-T cases where it is uneconomical to turn geothermal heat into electrical energy -- mostly due to Carnot's Law considerations.)

[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/527479452/Cowan-How-the-refr...

[2] https://archive.org/details/socialshapingoft0000unse_g5b0

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2014/f...

[4] https://boingboing.net/2012/08/20/how-the-refrigerator-got-i...