Frederick McKinley Jones

American engineer

• Born: May 17, 1892
• Birthplace: Cincinnati, Ohio
• Died: February 21, 1961
• Place of death: Minneapolis, Minnesota

Of more than sixty patents granted to Jones, forty were related to his system for mobile refrigeration. Other inventions include a ticket-dispensing machine, self-starting gas engine, starter generator, and thermostat and temperature control system.

Primary field: Electronics and electrical engineering

Primary invention: Mobile refrigeration

Early Life

On May 17, 1892, Frederick McKinley Jones was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, to John Jones, an Irish American railroad worker, and an African American mother who abandoned the family soon after Frederick’s birth. Wanting his son to receive an education, John placed him in the care of the priest at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Father Edward A. Ryan, who gave the boy odd jobs to do and took an interest in helping him develop his amazing mechanical aptitude. Jones was orphaned at age nine.

Jones left the rectory at age eleven to go to Cincinnati and work at the R. C. Crothers Garage. Though Jones was hired to keep the garage clean, his employer noticed his unusual aptitude and allowed him to work full-time as a mechanic when he turned fourteen, the minimum age to work legally in Ohio. Soon, Jones became a foreman. Meanwhile, he developed a keen interest in auto racing and helped build racing cars. He relocated to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he did janitorial and maintenance work at a hotel. A guest offered him a job maintaining and repairing the machinery and automobiles on a huge farm in the town of Hallock.

When the farm was sold, Jones remained in Hallock for the next eighteen years except for a stint in the U.S. Army’s 809th Pioneer Infantry in France during World War I. His unusual mechanical skill was soon noted and his services requested by various military camps. In a short time, he was promoted to sergeant, a rank rarely accorded an African American soldier at that time. Having done some correspondence study in electrical engineering, he taught classes in electrical circuitry. After his discharge, Jones returned to Hallock, where he became actively involved in community affairs, race-car driving, and inventions. In 1946, after Jones had relocated to Minneapolis, he married. He and his wife, Lucille, lived in an apartment over the Thermo King plant.

Life’s Work

Despite having a limited formal education, Jones displayed an amazing aptitude for working with all kinds of mechanical things and had an inventive mind. After enlisting in the Army during World War I, he quickly demonstrated his prowess as a mechanic. In addition to repairing military vehicles, he fixed X-ray machines and worked with electrical wiring. After his return to Hallock at the end of the war, Jones wasted no time in further developing his inventive genius. Among the numerous odd jobs that he did, Jones served as a chauffeur for doctors making house calls during the winters. When it became difficult to drive through the snow, he remained undaunted: He attached skis to an old airplane body and attached an airplane propeller to a motor, producing an effective, if unconventional, “snowmobile.” In a conversation with a doctor on one occasion, the physician was bemoaning the fact that patients had to come into his office to get X-ray pictures taken, so Jones designed a portable X-ray machine that the doctor could take with him when he made house calls.

Unfortunately, during these earlier years of invention, it did not occur to Jones to have his inventions patented; thus, he saw other inventors become wealthy from their protected versions of various machines and devices. In the late 1920’s, he designed a ticket-dispensing machine for movie theaters that would automatically dispense tickets and change. This time, he applied for a patent on the device, which was granted in 1939. About the same time, he found a way to convert silent movie projectors into talking projectors, attracting the attention of his future partner,Joseph A. Numero, who hired him to improve the sound equipment made by his firm, Cinema Supplies, Inc. Amazingly, Jones worked with scrap metal to make the parts needed to deliver a sound track to the video, and he worked with the device to stabilize and improve the quality of the picture.

By the 1930’s, Jones was perfecting a system to provide a mechanical refrigeration system for long-haul trucks and railroad cars that would eliminate the risk of food spoilage. This system would later be adapted for use in other types of food carriers such as ships. Jones received a patent for his vehicle air-conditioning device in 1940, and Numero established the U.S. Thermo Control Company (later Thermo King) in Minneapolis.

During the 1940’s, Jones continued to invent devices related to refrigeration and air-conditioning in addition to other types of devices. In the area of refrigeration technology, he invented a removable cooling unit for compartments in 1943 as well as an air-conditioning unit in 1949. During the early to mid-1940’s, he received a patent for a self-starting gas engine. In later years, Jones worked on improving and adapting his inventions. In 1949, he patented a starter generator for cooling gas engines. The next year, he developed another two-cycle engine; in 1958, a combustion engine device.

During World War II, the U.S. government used Jones’s portable air conditioner to preserve blood serum and medicines. In 1944, he was inducted into the American Society of Refrigeration Engineers, the first African American to receive such an honor. This honor was especially meaningful in the light of Jones’s limited formal education. During the 1950’s, the Department of Defense and the Bureau of Standards sought his services as a consultant.

Jones continued to improve on existing items and invent new ones when he saw a need. His final patent was granted on February 23, 1960, almost exactly a year before his death from lung cancer in Minneapolis. In 1991, Jones and his business partner, Joseph Numero, were posthumously awarded one of the highest honors available to an inventor, the National Medal of Technology. President George H. W. Bush presented the medals to their widows in a ceremony held in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, D.C. In 2007, Thermo King, which had become a multimillion-dollar international corporation, dedicated a research and development center in Bloomington, Minnesota, in honor of Jones.

Impact

The sheer number and diversity of patents acquired by Jones is astonishing. At least forty of his more than sixty patents were related to refrigeration. His technology literally revolutionized the distribution methods for transporting food and other perishables over long distances. Since his innovations in refrigeration made fresh produce available year-round to people living anywhere in the United States, his work changed the way Americans planned meals, as a wide variety of out-of-season foods were made available in both fresh and frozen form. His work in refrigeration also facilitated the development of international markets and resulted in the creation of frozen-food and fast-food industries as well as container shipping.

Jones’s inventions in refrigeration were not limited to food products. During World War II, a modified version of his portable air conditioner allowed the U.S. military to preserve blood serum and medicines so that they could be parachuted to troops behind enemy lines. Nor was the impact of Jones’s technological genius limited to the field of refrigeration and air conditioning: The movie industry was forever changed after Jones devised a way to adapt silent movie projectors so that they could play back recorded sound, thus introducing the “talking picture.”

Bibliography

Brodie, James Michael. Created Equal: The Lives and Ideas of Black American Innovators. New York: William Morrow, 1993. Arranged chronologically, this book profiles more than sixty African American innovators and inventors, beginning with slave inventors and moving through to those in the modern era. Contains a section on Jones’s life and inventions.

Sluby, Patricia Carter. The Inventive Spirit of African Americans: Patented Ingenuity. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Using a historical approach beginning with African creations, the book moves on to inventions made during the period of slavery in the United States, treating both enslaved and free persons of color. Notes inventions by African Americans that were important to the war effort during World War I and the “balm” that the Civil Rights era afforded African Americans in terms of being able to demonstrate their skills and creativity. Jones is included in several appropriate sections of the book. A lengthy appendix contains a roster of African American patentees from 1821 through the mid-1990’s.

Swanson, Gloria M., and Margaret V. Ott. I’ve Got an Idea: The Story of Frederick McKinley Jones. Minneapolis, Minn.: Runestone Press, 1994. Modernized edition of the authors’ 1976 book, Man with a Million Ideas. Suitable for readers in grades three to six. Portrays Jones’s victories and hardships without idealizing him. Describes his work and major honors. Numerous black-and-white photographs.