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"It's hard to tell stories about critters that are not human. John W. Campbell tried it, in "Twilight," and everybody says it's a wonderful story, and nobody ever reads it twice."
- Jerry Pournelle

Merry-Go-Round Life Suspension (Refrigerator Plant)  
  A device that offered cold sleep.  

Then I had promptly taken my leave of Captain Sperry and his wife, and gone directly to my refrigeration plant, where I was to suspend my life by instantaneous freezing.

I clicked the switches, and one of the two huge horizontal wheels—one in reserve, in the event of a breakdown—opened up for me like a door opening in the side of a gigantic doughnut, or better, a tubular merry go round. There was my nook waiting for me to crawl in...

A warning click sounded, a lid closed over me, my refrigerator – merry go round whirled— Blackness!

IN a moment—or so it seemed—I was again gazing into the light of the refrigerating room. The lid stood open.

A stimulating warmth circulated through my limbs. Perhaps the machine, I half consciously concluded, had made no more than a preliminary revolution.


(Life Suspension from 'The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years' by Don Wilcox)

I bounded out with a single thought. I must find Louise. We could still be married. For the present I would postpone my entrance into the ice. And since the machine had been equipped with two merry-go-round freezers as an emergency safeguard...

We entered the records room. There I faced the inescapable fact. My full century had passed. The original crew of the Flashaway were long gone. A completely new generation was on the register.

Or, more accurately, three new generations: the children, the grandchildren, and the great-grandchildren of the generation I had known.

One hundred years had passed—and I had lain so completely suspended, owing to the freezing, that only a moment of my own life had been absorbed.

Technovelgy from The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years, by Don Wilcox.
Published by Amazing Stories in 1940
Additional resources -

Captain Grimstone pops out every century to check on the ship:

MY chief complaint against my merry-go-round freezer was that it didn’t give me any rest. One whirl into blackness, and the next thing I knew I popped out of the open lid again with not so much as a minute’s time to reorganize my thoughts.

Well, here it was, 2266—two hundred years since the take-off.

Compare to cold-sleep from Between Planets (1951) by Robert Heinlein and the frigorific process from the 1879 story The Senator's Daughter, by Edward Page Mitchell.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years
  More Ideas and Technology by Don Wilcox
  Tech news articles related to The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years
  Tech news articles related to works by Don Wilcox

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