King of Cool

Thermo King honors inventor Fred Jones, dedicates $7.1 million R&D center to him.

Tom Berg • Senior Equipment Editor

Thermo King, the self-proclaimed King of Cool, intends to keep its crown, partly by investing heavily in research & development to ensure its products are the best available. Company officials dedicated its expanded R&D center in Bloomington, Minn., to Frederick McKinley Jones, a tinkerer and self-educated engineer who 69 years ago invented what TK says was the first successful transport refrigeration unit and helped found the company. Fred's earnest face was displayed in photos throughout the Thermo King building and during a July 30th ribbon-cutting ceremony that marked the dedication.

High-tech apparatus in the $7.1 million center tests components for performance and durability, trying to find flaws that can be corrected before products enter production. One device that particularly relates to how Fred Jones got involved in the reefer business: It's a multi-axial electro dynamic shaker, which, with its attendant equipment and dedicated room, cost $2.2 million, according to TK engineers. The device punishes prototype reefers with constant, oscillating shock loads, some of them purposely at random to simulate the pounding they'll see as they're carried down streets and highways aboard trucks and trailers.

Vibration is what had kept stationary cooling units from being used on trucks and railcars, even though the equipment was becoming common by the 1930s in various buildings, theaters, food processing plants and homes, where refrigerators were replacing ice boxes. Necessity mothers invention, as it did the mechanical transport reefer.

It began as many business ventures have, on a golf course, this one in Minneapolis on a hot May day in 1938. The story has circulated in the industry almost since it happened, and is told in some detail in a biography of Fred Jones, called "I've Got An Idea!"

A game among four friends was interrupted when one of them, Harry Werner of Werner Transportation, left to take a phone call. He got the news that one of his trucks had broken down on its way to Chicago and its load of processed poultry had spoiled. Ice in the trailer's bunkers had melted as the truck sat in the daytime heat.

Upset at his loss, Werner railed at one of his golfing partners, Al Fineberg, president of a refrigeration company, "If you guys can cool off a big movie theater, you ought to be able to rig up something that could keep a truckload of chickens from spoiling!"

"We've tried to refrigerate trailers, Harry," Fineberg replied, "but when we put mechanical refrigeration on the road, the jarring and jolting of the truck knocks the whole thing apart. That kind of equipment only works in a stationary object. Besides, where are you going to get enough electrical power while you are driving down the highway?"

Businessman Joe Numero, another of the golfers, had a jocular answer. "Harry, if Al here can't cool your trucks, I will. I'll put a generator on the wheel of the trailer." Fineberg was not amused, and retorted, "I suppose your man Jones could make a machine for Al's trailer."

"Of course he could," Numero said. Jones was working for him and Numero knew of Jones' talent at inventing things, even though their enterprises thus far had not touched on trucks or refrigeration.

Within a week Werner called Numero to say that he was sending over a new trailer and told him, "Put that new refrigeration unit on it that you were bragging about last Thursday."

Jones and his crew, who until that time had worked on products for the cinema, examined the trailer, and after about a half hour Jones said, "We ought to be able to fix up something, Mr. Numero." They did. Years earlier, Jones had learned how to make racing cars resist shock, and he used that experience and the crew's knowledge of electrical devices in this project. He and his workers rigged a four-cylinder gasoline engine to drive the refrigeration compressor, and devised a starter-generator-flywheel for the engine. A thermostat inside the trailer controlled the unit. All the equipment went into a cabinet hung from the trailer's floor; the unit weighed 2,200 pounds.

It kept the trailer cool but wasn't very efficient, so Jones redesigned it, and used lightweight materials to cut its weight by 400 pounds. This worked better, and Jones and Numero's shop built three "Model A" reefers by the end of '38. Experience showed that moisture and road debris beat the underslung units to death, so Jones designed a nose-hung version that weighed only 950 pounds. Meanwhile, Numero had the design patented in both their names.

Interest in the products and the concept from folks in the food and grocery business caused Numero to sell his movie-related businesses and concentrate on transport refrigeration. He and Jones formed the United States Thermo Control Co. Its subsequent reefer units were called Thermotrol, soon changed to Thermo King, and that eventually became the company's name.

Practical, reliable temperature-controlled carriage of perishable foods by fast-traveling trucks caused a revolution in the way Americans ate. In the late '30s, most processed fruits and vegetables were canned, and those sold fresh were either locally grown or brought in by insulated and iced railroad boxcars. Inherent delays in train movements, plus necessary stops to re-ice and salt the cars' bunkers, made deliveries slow. Some fresh produce items were unavailable in northern climes outside the growing season or were sometimes unappetizing items grown in "hothouses."

That gradually changed as reefer trucks captured the long-haul business from the rails – though Jones in the late '40s designed reefers for railcars and actually traveled with them to monitor their operation – and we only need look around today's supermarkets to see the vast array of fresh and frozen foods now available, thanks to transport refrigeration, most of it still in trucks.

How he got to Minneapolis to help start that revolution is a story in itself, and one also told in his biography. Jones was born in 1893, son of an African-American mother and Irish-American father in Covington, Ky. Through the years he overcame early 20th Century society's racism by working hard and learning everything he could about electrical and mechanical things. He learned by reading books and journals, by taking things apart to see how they worked, and working in jobs where he maintained various equipment.

His mother died young and his railroad-worker father left him at age 7 with a Catholic priest in Cincinnati, where he got a strict upbringing. At age 15, Jones left to seek his own life. He got jobs firing steam engines on a paddle boat in the Mississippi near St. Louis, fixing early automobiles at a Cadillac dealer in Chicago, and repairing a steam boiler in a hotel in Effingham, Ill. He learned about a job repairing and running farm equipment at Hallock, in far northwestern Minnesota, and went there in 1912.

The large farm was owned by Walter Hill, wealthy son of a railroad magnate, who was impressed with Fred Jones' knack for fixing, understanding and improving mechanical and electrical equipment. Jones got into car racing, both building the cars and aggressively driving one on dirt tracks in the Midwest. He was cheered by crowds who loved his driving style and winning ways, but sometimes resented by white competitors.

He had many friends in all-white Hallock and always treasured his days there, but some citizens expected the young black man to stay in his place. Though he had moved fairly freely in the white world, he joined a segregated U.S. Army in late 1917 for service in the Great War and chafed at the limitations it placed on him because of his race. But his talent with electricity got him a good assignment: wiring camps for lighting – with German prisoners as his helpers.

After being discharged, he returned to Hallock and resumed tinkering. He invented a portable X-ray machine for a local doctor, took much of the flicker out of flickering silent films of the '20s for a local theater owner, and developed an optical sound-on-film process and a ticket dispenser. He never thought to patent anything. In 1930 those devices got the attention of Joe Numero in Minneapolis, who asked Jones to travel there for an interview.

Jones had odd work habits; he disappeared for days at a time and sometimes had to be retrieved from local taverns. He liked to party, and the book says he would wine and dine his old friends from Hallock when they came to the big city, staying up late and spending wads of cash. That sometimes left him broke until the next payday, a situation that was fixed when he and Joe Numero struck a deal: Joe would support Fred and made sure he had enough money in return for rights to Fred's inventions.

Although Numero greatly respected Jones' abilities, he didn't socialize with him. That's perhaps why the fourth golfer during that important match back in '38 wasn't Jones, but another white businessman. Still, Jones' reputation as a refrigeration expert was spreading. At the start of World War II, he and other engineers in the field were summoned to Washington, D.C., by the military, who needed their advice on shipping blood plasma and food to the troops overseas. The other engineers stayed at a fine hotel, but Jones was assigned to one set aside for colored people. Yet the military brass selected his design as the basis for their standardized reefer shipping units.

In 1946, Jones got married – to a white woman, at a time when mixed-race marriages were most unusual – but his life centered on Thermo King. He and his wife, Lucille, lived in an apartment above the TK plant and he worked and tinkered and constantly improved the company's refrigeration products. He was what we'd now call a workaholic, spending long hours in the plant and roaming through it on weekends, looking for flawed parts so he could correct the situation that caused them. He was demanding of other employees, especially other African-Americans because he wanted them to succeed.

He had the title of vice president, engineering, and made a fairly comfortable salary, but owned no part of the firm. He declined offers of big-paying jobs at other companies because he was loyal to Thermo King and its "babies" – the products he worked on. He designed the research department in TK's new building in Bloomington, but by 1956, when it opened, his health had declined, and he never visited the place. He was largely bed-ridden the next five years, and even after surgery to remove a brain tumor, "ideas still poured from his mind," dazzling the doctors and nurses who cared for him, the book says. Among other things, he designed a device that lifted and lowered his weakened body in the hospital bed. He died in 1961.

It probably never occurred to the leaders of Thermo King in those days to name anything after Fred Jones. But today's executives, and those of TK's corporate parent, Ingersoll Rand, paid handsome tribute to him at that ceremony this summer.

Reefers, and the stationary refrigeration and cooling products that TK also makes, have come a long way since his time, and thanks to the expanded R&D facilities and efforts of its staff, will continue to advance. Jones surely would be delighted to take today's reefer products apart to see how they work, and help make them even better.