Carl Paul Gottfried Linde was a German scientist, engineer, and businessman. He discovered a refrigeration cycle and invented the first industrial-scale air separation and gas liquefaction processes, which led to the first reliable and efficient compressed-ammonia refrigerator in 1876.
Carl Paul Gottfried Linde was a German scientist, engineer, and businessman. He discovered a refrigeration cycle and invented the first industrial-scale air separation and gas liquefaction processes, which led to the first reliable and efficient compressed-ammonia refrigerator in 1876.
Born: 11 June 1842, Upper Franconia, Germany
Died: 16 November 1934, Munich, Germany

Carl von Linde, a German engineer whose invention of a continuous process of liquefying gases in large quantities formed a basis for the modern technology of refrigeration and provided both impetus and means for conducting scientific research at low temperatures and very high vacuums.
Born in Berndorf, Germany as the son of a German-born minister and Swedish mother, was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps, but took another direction entirely. Von Linde’s family moved to Münich, Bavaria in 1854 and eight years later he started a course in engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland
In 1864, he was expelled before graduating for participating in a student protest, but his lecturer, 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. 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. As an assistant professor of machine design he developed a methyl ether refrigerator (1874) and an ammonia refrigerator (1876). Though other refrigeration units had been developed earlier, Linde’s were the first to be designed with the aim of precise calculations of efficiency.
In 1895 he set up a large-scale plant for the production of liquid air. Six years later he developed a method for separating pure liquid oxygen from liquid air that resulted in widespread industrial conversion to processes utilizing oxygen (e.g., in steel manufacture).