Frederick McKinley Jones: Sixth Grade Dropout Who Built the Cold Chain

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Frederick McKinley Jones was born in Cincinnati in 1893 to an Irish railroad worker and a Black American mother who left the family early. Taken in for a time by Father Ryan, a Catholic priest in Covington, Kentucky, he lost his father at nine and left school after the sixth grade at 11. Sweeping a Cincinnati garage, he taught himself mechanics and was shop foreman by 14. In 1912 he moved to Hallock, Minnesota, to work on James J. Hill's 50,000-acre farm, where he learned steam locomotives and electrical systems and earned the state's top engineering license. He said Hallock judged him on character and skill rather than race. In World War I he served in an all-Black Army unit, rose to sergeant and wired his camp for power, telegraph and telephone.

Back in Hallock Jones built the transmitter for the town's first radio station and a device to keep film and sound in sync. That brought him to Minneapolis businessman Joseph A. Numero, who hired him in 1927 to convert silent projectors to sound. Around 1938 Numero asked for a truck cooling unit after a trucker lost a poultry load to heat. The underslung Model A was too heavy and the Model B too fragile; the 1941 Model C, built first from junkyard parts, sat at the front of the trailer on rubber shock mounts. The pair formed U.S. Thermo Control, later Thermo King, worth $3 million by 1949, and its portable units carried food, medicine and blood plasma in World War II.

• Jones also invented a ticket dispensing machine, a portable X-ray machine and a propeller-driven snowmobile on skis.
• He held 61 patents, 40 of them in refrigeration.
• In 1944 he became the first Black member of the American Society of Refrigeration Engineers.
• He died of lung cancer in Minneapolis in early 1961 at age 67.
• In 1991 he and Numero received the National Medal of Technology, Jones being the first Black American to receive it.