Carl von Linde
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| Carl von Linde |
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Carl Paul
Gottfried Linde (11 June
1842 – 16 November 1934) was a German scientist, engineer, and businessman. He
discovered a refrigeration cycle and invented the first industrial-scale air separation and gas liquefaction processes. These breakthroughs laid the
backbone for the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physics that was awarded to Heike Kamerlingh Onnes.[1] Linde was a member of scientific and
engineering associations, including being on the board of trustees of the Physikalisch-Technische
Reichsanstalt and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences
and Humanities. Linde was also the founder of what is now known as Linde plc, the world's largest industrial gases
company, and ushered the creation of the supply chain of industrial gases as a profitable line of businesses. He was knighted in 1897 as Ritter von Linde. Carl von
Linde invented the first reliable and efficient compressed-ammonia refrigerator
in 1876.[2]
Contents
Biography
Early years
Born in Berndorf [de], Bavaria[3] as the son of a German-born minister and a
Swedish mother, he was expected to follow in his father's footsteps but took
another direction entirely. Von Linde's family moved to Munich in 1854, and eight years later he started a
course in engineering at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland, where his teachers included Rudolf Clausius, Gustav Zeuner and Franz Reuleaux.
In 1864, he was expelled
before graduating for participating in a student protest, but Reuleaux found
him a position as an apprentice at the Kottern cotton-spinning plant in Kempten. Linde stayed only a short time before moving first to Borsig in Berlin and then to the new Krauss locomotive factory in Munich, where he worked as head of the technical
department. Von Linde married Helene Grimm in September 1866; their marriage
lasted 53 years and they had six children.[4]
In 1868 Linde learned of a
new university opening in Munich (the Technische Hochschule) and immediately applied for a job as a
lecturer; he was accepted—at the age of 26—for the position. He became a full
professor of mechanical engineering in 1872, and set up an engineering lab
where students such as Rudolf Diesel studied.
Middle years
In 1870 and 1871, Linde
published articles in the Bavarian Industry and Trade Journal describing
his research findings in the area of refrigeration. Linde's first refrigeration plants were
commercially successful, and development began to take up increasing amounts of
his time. In 1879, he gave up his professorship and founded the Gesellschaft
für Lindes Eismaschinen Aktiengesellschaft ("Linde's Ice Machine Company"),
now Linde plc, in Wiesbaden, Germany. After a slow start in a difficult German economy, business
picked up quickly in the 1880s. The efficient new refrigeration technology offered
big benefits to the breweries, and by 1890 Linde had sold 747 machines. In
addition to the breweries, other uses for the new technology were found in
slaughterhouses and cold storage facilities all over Europe.
In 1890, Linde moved back
to Munich where he took up his professorship once more, but was soon back at
work developing new refrigeration cycles. In 1892, an order from the Guinness brewery in Dublin for a carbon dioxide liquefaction plant drove Linde's research
into the area of low-temperature refrigeration, and in 1894 he started work on
a process for the liquefaction of air. In 1895, Linde first achieved success,[5] and filed for patent protection of his process (not approved in
the US until 1903). In 1901, Linde began work on a technique to obtain pure oxygen and nitrogen based on the fractional distillation of liquefied air. By 1910, coworkers
including Carl's son Friedrich had developed the Linde double-column
process, variants of which are still in common use today.
After a decade, Linde
withdrew from managerial activities to refocus on research, and in 1895 he
succeeded in liquefying air by first compressing it and then letting it expand
rapidly, thereby cooling it. He then obtained oxygen and nitrogen from the
liquid air by slow warming. In the early days of oxygen production, the biggest
use by far for the gas was the oxyacetylene torch, invented in France in 1903, which revolutionized metal cutting
and welding in the construction of ships, skyscrapers, and other iron and steel structures.
In 1897, Linde was
appointed to the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown and ennobled in accordance with its
statutes.
In addition to Linde's
technical and engineering abilities, he was a successful entrepreneur. He
formed many successful partnerships in Germany and internationally, working
effectively to exploit the value of his patents and knowledge through licensing
arrangements.
In 1906, Linde negotiated a
stake in Brin's Oxygen Company, renamed The BOC Group. in exchange for rights to Linde's patents
in the UK and other countries, and held a board position until 1914.[6] Linde also formed the Linde Air Products
Company in the USA in 1907, a company that passed through US Government control
to Union Carbide in the 1940s and on to form Praxair. In 2005 Linde, plc bought the BOC
Group, and in 2019 Linde plc merged with Praxair, thus combining all
three companies founded by Linde.
Later years
and death
From around 1910 Linde
started transferring responsibility for the company's operation to his sons
Friedrich and Richard and to his son-in-law Rudolf Wucherer. He continued with
supervisory board and advisory duties until his death.
Carl von Linde died in
Munich in November 1934 at the age of 92.
Key inventions
Linde's first refrigeration
system used dimethyl ether as the refrigerant and was built by Maschinenfabrik
Augsburg (now MAN
AG) for the Spaten Brewery in 1873. He quickly moved on to develop more reliable ammonia-based cycles. These were early examples of vapor-compression refrigeration machines, and ammonia is still in wide use
as a refrigerant in industrial applications.
His apparatus for the
liquefaction of air combined the cooling effect achieved by allowing a
compressed gas to expand (the Joule–Thomson effect first observed by James Prescott Joule and Lord Kelvin) with a counter-current heat exchange
technique that used the cold air produced by expansion to chill ambient air
entering the apparatus. Over a period of time this effect gradually cooled the
apparatus and air within it to the point of liquefaction.[7]
Linde followed development
of air liquefaction equipment with equipment that also separated air into its
constituent parts using distillation processes.[8]
Linde's inventions and
developments spurred development in many areas of cryogenics,[9] physics, chemistry and engineering.
With affection,
Ruben
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