Jones, Frederick McKinley

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Frederick McKinley Jones

1893-1961

Inventor, refrigeration engineer

As one of the unsung heroes of twentieth-century industrial science, Frederick McKinley Jones was a self-taught electrician and inventor who held sixty-one patents, forty of them in refrigeration technology. His most significant contribution to the modern age was an air-conditioning unit for trucks and other cargo carriers, an invention that helped launch the frozen-foods industry.

Jones was born in 1893 in Covington, Kentucky, although one source cites his birthplace as Cincinnati, Ohio, which is just across the Ohio River from Covington, and others claim he was born in 1892. Little is known about his mother except that she was African American and may have been unable to care for him herself, so she left him with his white father, John Jones, who worked for the railroad. As a youngster, Jones demonstrated a fascination with all things mechanical and, if left on his own, would disassemble anything in the house to see how it worked. When he was seven years old, his Irish-Catholic father sent him to live with priests at the West Covington Roman Catholic Church and School to bring some discipline and education into his life. John Jones died two years later, and two years after that, when Jones was eleven, he ran away from the West Covington rectory.

Across the river in Cincinnati, Jones found work in a garage that repaired carriages, and when his mechanical skills became apparent, he trained as a mechanic and was a full-time employee there by the age of fourteen. Eventually, he was promoted to foreman at the garage. During this period, around 1910, horse-drawn carriages were rapidly being replaced by gasoline-powered vehicles, and Jones proved his aptitude for diagnosing and solving issues with this new technology, too. In his spare time, he retooled conventional vehicles into amateur race cars and piloted his creations on the dirt tracks that were the standard proving grounds for auto enthusiasts and engineers during that era. He quit racing when he was in his early thirties, after a particularly bad crash.

Settled in Northern Minnesota

Jones left Cincinnati and eventually began working on a Mississippi River steamship based in St. Louis. By the time he reached his twentieth birthday in 1913, he was employed by a Minneapolis hotel as its janitor and boiler operator. His mechanical talents were noticed by the hotel guest Oscar Younggren, who offered him a position as master mechanic on a fifty-thousand-acre farm in Minnesota's Red River Valley. Jones spent the next eighteen years in the town of Hallock, located in a fertile slice of Minnesota near the border it shared with North Dakota and Canada, leaving only to serve in the U.S. Army during World War I. He was assigned to an all-black unit, but once again his abilities caught the attention of his superiors, and he spent his time maintaining and repairing communications and other electronic equipment for several army units.

Returning to Hallock after the war, Jones worked as a mechanic and as the town's movie projectionist while studying electrical engineering via a correspondence course. He was also married for a time, to a woman of Swedish heritage. In a place where minorities were scarce, Jones found Hallock and its residents tolerant and welcoming to him, later saying in a Saturday Evening Post interview by Steven M. Spencer that there "a man…[was] judged more on his character and ability than on the color of his skin." He was a member of the village band and a choral quartet, and he replaced his passion for auto racing with the more sedate pastimes of hunting and fishing.

Working as the projectionist for the local movie theater in Hallock, Jones devised a piece of equipment that eased the transition from silent films to "talking" ones, as the first sound pictures were called in the late 1920s. To show the new sound movies, theater operators needed to buy a new, prohibitively expensive piece of equipment that let audiences hear the soundtrack in synchronization with the images. Hallock's theater was unable to afford this, so Jones built one on his own for less than $100, which offered better sound quality than its more expensive counterparts. This and a few more improvements in the movie-theater realm brought him to the attention of the Minneapolis company Cinema Supplies in 1930. Its president, Joseph Numero, offered him a job, and Jones took it and moved back to Minnesota's largest urban center. A few years later, he began applying for and receiving patents for his inventions. The first was granted in 1939 for a ticket-dispensing machine that returned change, which was still in use in the early 1990s.

"We Were Stuck with It"

Jones's most lasting achievement came about as the result of a conversation on a golf course. In 1938 Numero was out on the links with two business associates, one of them a trucking-company executive named Harry Werner. Werner suggested to the third golfer, who was in the air-conditioning business, that he should devise a method to prevent poultry and other food products from spoiling on long-distance hauls. At that time, huge blocks of ice were used to keep food shipments cold, but this method had the obvious disadvantage in that the ice only lasted so long during the summer months. Werner's suggestion led to a discussion about how to refrigerate a trailer-truck, and at one point Numero playfully proposed building a refrigeration unit for Werner's trucks. Werner accepted the proposal and had one of his trucks delivered to Cinema Supplies for a tryout. Numero told Spencer that when he heard Werner had sent him a truck to be fitted with some sort of cooling unit, "I expected to give it a quick once over and tell Werner it couldn't be done. But Jones beat me to it. He climbed into the trailer, made some measurements and calculations, and popped his head out to announce he guessed he could fix up something. And we were stuck with it."

Jones's idea was a refrigeration unit that was mounted in the front of the truck and had the crucially advantageous feature of being shockproof. It was granted U.S. Patent No. D 132,182 on July 12, 1940, and became the cornerstone for a new venture that Numero and Jones founded together: the U.S. Thermo Control Company. The firm's first refrigerated trucks were used to transport food to troops during World War II, and in the postwar decade during the building of the U.S. interstate system, the company grew immensely as frozen foods became a staple of the supermarket industry. Jones's invention also allowed dairy and meat products to be transported hundreds of miles from their point of origin, which revolutionized the way that people in most developed nations ate.

At a Glance …

Born Frederick McKinley Jones on May 17, 1893 (some sources say 1892), in Covington, KY; died of lung cancer, February 21, 1961, in Minneapolis, MN; son of John Jones (a railroad worker); first marriage to a Swedish-American woman in Minnesota ended in divorce; married Lucille, 1946. Military service: U.S. Army during World War I and World War II, reached the rank of sergeant.

Career: Cincinnati repair garage, sweeper, around 1904, became automobile mechanic then foreman; worked on a Mississippi River steamship based in St. Louis, after 1910; hotel in Minneapolis, janitor and boiler-maintenance technician; became master mechanic for a fifty-thousand-acre farm near Hallock, Minnesota, around 1913; mechanic and movie projectionist in Hallock, around 1918-30; Cinema Supplies, Minneapolis, MN, 1930; U.S. Thermo Control Company, founding partner, 1938; consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Bureau of Standards after 1945.

Awards: U.S. National Medal of Technology laureate (posthumous), 1991.

Even though he was in his late forties when the United States entered World War II, Jones served once again in the U.S. Army. However, instead of being assigned combat duty, he spent the war working on several new inventions. These included portable cooling units that were used by army medics to keep medicines and blood serum chilled and safe; similar units were installed in the cockpits of B-29 aircraft to keep the pilots from sweltering. After the war, Jones worked as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Bureau of Standards.

Jones died of lung cancer on February 21, 1961, in Minneapolis. He was survived by his second wife, Lucille. That same year, Numero sold Thermo Control, which became the Thermo King Corporation, to the Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Thermo King remained a leader in manufacturing transport temperature control systems, and became part of the Ingersoll Rand family of companies in 1997. In 2007 it opened a new Minneapolis research and development facility and named the $7.1 million building in honor of Jones. "Our R&D facility is not yet complete, and it never will be complete," said Ingersoll Rand senior vice president Steve Shawley in the industry journal Refrigerated Transporter. "We operate in a reliability culture, driven by the need to optimize and improve the reliability of the overall cold chain. That is our simple goal, our simple quest, made possible by Frederick McKinley Jones."