Frederick McKinley Jones

Frederick McKinley Jones was born on the seventeenth of May 1893 at Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of an Irish-American railway worker named John Jones and a Black mother whose name does not appear in the surviving public record. His mother died when he was nine months old. His father — unable to raise the child alone — placed him at seven in the care of a Catholic priest at Covington, Kentucky, who entrusted him for the following ten years to the rectory and boarding-school of the Sisters of Mercy. He ran away at twelve to work as a mechanic's apprentice on a Cincinnati racing-car shop. He served in the United States Army in France during the First World War as an electrician.

He moved to Hallock, Minnesota, in 1919 — having corresponded with a farm manager there from his army postings — and worked through his twenties as the resident mechanic at a Hallock farm-machinery shop. He taught himself across those years the electronics of the new radio broadcasting industry, designed and built around 1925 a sound-system that synchronised motion-picture playback with phonograph recording, and was hired by the entrepreneur Joseph Numero of the Cinema Supplies Company of Minneapolis to commercialise the technology. He worked at Cinema Supplies from 1930 across the next two decades.

His decisive invention came in 1938. Numero — having heard from a competitor that a poker partner had lost a load of chickens to summer heat in transit — set Jones the problem of designing a refrigeration unit small enough and durable enough to mount on the cab of a delivery truck. The solution Jones produced — Patent 2,303,857 of December 1942 — was the first practical portable mechanical refrigeration system. Numero and Jones founded the Thermo King Corporation in 1938 to manufacture it. By 1945 the Thermo King unit had become the standard refrigeration equipment for the wartime US Army provisioning chain and the post-war commercial refrigerated-trucking industry; by 1960 the technology had been adopted by the entire American frozen-food, dairy and pharmaceutical distribution chains.

He filed over sixty patents across his career — refrigeration, ticket-dispensing machines, X-ray machines, gasoline engines. He died of lung cancer at Minneapolis on the twenty-first of February 1961, at sixty-seven.

He is honored here as the inventor of the refrigerated truck.