Frederick McKinley Jones: The Road Changed Forever Hoodie

Every cold thing that ever reached you on a truck owes him.

Frederick McKinley Jones was born in Cincinnati in 1893. He lost his mother young, left school around the sixth grade, and was working in a garage before he was a teenager. Nobody taught him engineering. He took engines apart until he understood them, then built better ones.

He served in France in World War I, wired his small Minnesota town for its first radio station, and built sound equipment for movie theaters. In the late 1930s a trucking problem landed on his bench: loads of food were spoiling on the road because ice and salt couldn't hold a temperature over a long haul. Jones designed a refrigeration unit tough enough to ride on a truck and take the shaking, and co-founded the company that became Thermo King to build it. His patent for a removable cooling unit for vehicles was granted in 1949.

During World War II his units kept blood, medicine and food cold on the way to troops and field hospitals. Grocery stores stopped depending on what grew nearby. The cold chain that feeds the country today runs on his idea.

Sixty-one patents, about forty of them in refrigeration. The first Black member of the American Society of Refrigerating Engineers. In 1991, thirty years after his death, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology, the first Black American to receive it.

Next time you pass a reefer trailer humming on the interstate, that's him.

The design

Front: a weathered portrait of Jones with his signature, F. M. Jones. Self-taught. Inventor. 61 patents.
Back: his refrigerated truck drawn over the blueprints, half rust and half frost. "He developed practical mobile refrigeration. His work helped move food, medicine, and blood across great distances." The Road Changed Forever.
Sleeve: the gold Ryland Works crown.
Built to Endure.