Frederick McKinley Jones’ Story
Self-taught engineer and inventor Frederick McKinley Jones designed the first portable air-cooling unit for trucks. He was Thermo King’s first engineer, and his ingenuity created Thermo King and the transport refrigeration industry in 1938.
Early life
Jones was born in 1893 and grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, working odd jobs. One of them was as a janitor in a garage. He worked his way up to foreman of the shop and developed skills in automobile mechanics along the way.
He also took up racing cars and was one of the best around the Great Lakes area. He later moved to Minnesota, where he took a mechanic’s job on a farm and earned an engineering license.
How Thermo King began
After serving in the U.S. Army during World War I, Jones returned to the farm to dig deeper into engineering and electronics. He built the transmitter his town’s radio station used for broadcasting. After that, Joseph A. Numero hired him for his expertise in electronic engineering.
Jones and Numero later formed a partnership and designed and patented a portable air-cooling unit for trucks, which is how Thermo King came to be.
His inventions
Jones’ work went well beyond refrigerated transportation. His inventions include a device used to combine moving pictures with sound, a portable x-ray machine, personal radio units and an automatic ticket-dispensing machine.
He received more than 60 patents. In 1944, he became the first African American elected to the American Society of Refrigeration Engineers. He was inducted into the Minnesota Inventors Hall of Fame in 1977 and awarded the National Medal of Technology in 1991, both after his death. In October 2024, the American Truck Historical Society inducted him into its Hall of Fame.
His legacy
Jones’ invention helped create several new industries, from frozen foods to supermarkets to fast food restaurants. The U.S. Defense Department used his innovation in World War II. Besides transporting food, drugs and blood plasma, the cooling systems were used to air condition field hospitals and cockpits.
More than 80 years later, his invention helped deliver lifesaving vaccines to communities during a global pandemic.
