Frederick McKinley Jones had no formal education beyond the eighth grade. He was orphaned at nine. He ran away at eleven. He taught himself everything he knew — mechanics, electrical engineering, refrigeration science, sound technology — through work, reading, and an attention to how things functioned that his peers described as almost supernatural. By the time he died in 1961, he held 61 patents. Forty of them were in refrigeration alone. His invention kept Charles Drew’s blood plasma cold on the way to the battlefield.
Jones was born May 17, 1893, in Covington, Kentucky, to an Irish father and a Black mother. His mother left the family when he was young. His father, a railroad worker, struggled to raise him alone and eventually sent him at age seven to live with a priest at St. Ann Catholic Church in Covington. When his father died shortly after, Jones stayed at the rectory doing cleaning, cooking, and maintenance until age eleven — when he ran away and went to work.
He ended up at a garage in Cincinnati doing odd jobs, watching mechanics, absorbing everything. His aptitude was immediately apparent. He rose to foreman, got fired for racing cars on company time, drifted through more odd jobs, and landed in 1912 in Hallock, Minnesota, doing mechanical work on a farm. He read constantly — engineering manuals, technical journals, anything he could find. By twenty he had secured an engineering license in Minnesota. He served in World War I as a sergeant in France, where the Army gave him formal mechanical training that added structure to everything he had already taught himself.
After the war he kept building things nobody had asked him to build. He constructed a radio transmitter for a Minnesota town that didn’t have one. He invented a portable X-ray machine for a doctor who complained about patients having to come to his office. He converted silent movie projectors into talking pictures using scrap metal for parts — years before the major studios figured out how to do it. None of these early inventions were patented. He watched other people make fortunes from similar devices while he moved on to the next problem. He was not bitter about it. He kept going.
In 1927 he was hired as an electrical engineer by Joseph Numero at Ultraphone Sound Systems in Minneapolis. In 1938 a business associate of Numero’s named Harry Werner complained that he couldn’t ship food long distances without it spoiling. The ice melted. The food went bad. Numero joked that Werner needed a refrigerator in his truck. Werner bought an aluminum truck and asked if Jones could make that possible. Numero thought it was impossible. Jones climbed into the trailer, made some measurements and calculations, and came out saying he thought he could fix something up.
He fixed something up.
In 1940 Jones patented the first practical automatic refrigeration unit for long-haul trucks — a compact, shock-resistant, self-starting system that could be mounted to the front of the trailer and withstand the vibrations of road travel. Previous attempts at truck refrigeration had all failed because of vibration damage on the road. Jones solved the vibration problem. The unit ran on a four-cylinder engine. Chilled air moved through refrigerant tubing to the trailer interior. It was automatic — it didn’t need to be stopped and restarted at power sources like earlier systems. Jones and Numero founded the U.S. Thermo Control Company — later renamed Thermo King — to manufacture it.
Then the war came and everything changed in scale.
The United States military needed to move blood plasma, medicine, food, and water to the front lines under conditions that made conventional refrigeration impossible — jungle heat, Arctic cold, combat zones unreachable by road, forward positions supplied by airdrop. Jones’s portable refrigeration units were the answer to every version of that problem. His units were dropped by parachute into forward combat areas to refrigerate blood plasma, medicine, and food. They cooled the cockpits of B-29 bombers. They air-conditioned field hospitals in sweltering heat. They kept blood serums viable in conditions where without them, wounded soldiers died of shock before plasma could be administered.
Charles Drew had solved the science of plasma preservation. Frederick Jones solved the engineering of keeping it cold while it traveled. Together — one man’s chemistry and one man’s mechanical genius, both Black, both working at the same moment in history, both barred from full participation in the institutions their work was saving — they built the blood supply system that kept the Allied forces alive.
By 1949 the U.S. Thermo Control Company was worth millions of dollars. In 1944 Jones became the first Black American elected to the American Society of Refrigeration Engineers. In the 1950s he consulted for the U.S. Department of Defense and the Bureau of Standards. He continued filing patents until almost the day he died — his last patent was received in February 1960. He died February 21, 1961, of lung cancer in Minneapolis. He was 67. He is buried at the National Cemetery at Fort Snelling.
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush awarded Jones the National Medal of Technology — the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement — posthumously. Jones’s widow accepted the award at a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden. He was the first Black American to receive it.
An obituary in the Saturday Evening Post said of him: “Most engineers start at the bottom of a project and work up, but Fred takes a flying leap to the top of the mountain and then backs down, cutting steps for himself and the rest of us as he goes.”
The boy who ran away at eleven with no education, no money, and no one looking out for him — cut steps for the rest of us. The frozen food industry exists because of him. Fresh produce in winter exists because of him. The blood that kept Allied soldiers alive on the beaches of Normandy and in the jungles of the Pacific stayed cold because of him.
His company, Thermo King, still operates today. In 2022, during a global pandemic, his refrigeration technology was used to transport COVID-19 vaccines to communities worldwide — exactly the kind of last-mile medical supply problem he had spent his life solving.