Carl von Linde was born on June 11, 1842 in the Lutheran parsonage of Berndorf in the Oberfranken district of Bavaria. The family’s move to Kempten, where his father was assigned a parish, and his later attendance at the local high school put Carl von Linde in close contact with the family of the director of the Kempten cotton spinning mill.
In 1861, he started a course in engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. His teachers included Rudolf Clausius who was probably the first person to establish thermodynamics as a science.
Von Linde received his first practical training as an intern in the mechanical workshop of the Kottern cotton spinning plant near Kempten, then at Borsig in Berlin. He started work as an engineer in the Borsig drawing office in August 1865.
On the recommendation of the founding rector of the Polytechnic School in Munich (later Technical University) he was hired as an associate professor on August 24, 1868. Soon after this he became an assistant professor at Munich Technical High School, and it was there that he first turned his attention to refrigeration, publishing in 1871 a paper on “Improved Ice- and Refrigerating Machines”. The first machines built to his designs were constructed at the famous Maschinenfabrik-Augsburg, which afterwards built the first Diesel engines.
On December 24, 1872 was promoted to full professor of mechanical engineering. He included the theory of refrigeration machines in his teaching syllabus. In 1876, he made his first ammonia compressor with two vertical cylinders, followed in 1877 by a compressor of the double-acting horizontal type. This latter design “was quickly taken up all over the world, with almost immediate manufacture in five countries.”
Carl von Linde died in Munich in November 1934 at the age of 92.
Carl Von Linde: inventor the first industrial-scale air separation and gas liquefaction processes
