From refrigeration pioneer to international technology

Sketches and notes from Carl von Linde’s early lecture drafts when he served as an instructor (1868-1879) at the Polytechnic School in Munich (today TU Munich).

Carl von Linde, a professor at the Technical University of Munich, had come upon refrigeration as an area of research by way of a contest for a cooling unit for the crystallisation of paraffin. "The thought immediately struck me: here was an area of mechanical thermodynamics that had not yet been fully explored," he said, describing his newly-awakened curiosity in his 1916 memoirs "Aus meinem Leben und von meiner Arbeit."

Von Linde immediately set about laying the theoretical groundwork for an "improved ice and refrigeration machine." In his calculations of caloric efficiency, he had come to the conclusion that the cold vapor machine promised the highest yield of cooling energy as compared to the absorption machine and the cold air machine. The method he conceived would work with the lowest possible temperature differences and use methyl ether as the refrigerant.

In the summer of 1871 an agreement was made between von Linde, the Austrian brewer August Deiglmayr (Dreher Brewery) and Munich brewer Gabriel Sedlmayr to build a test machine according to Linde’s design, at the Spaten Brewery in Munich. With their help, Linde’s ideas would be put into practice, so that a refrigeration unit could then be installed at the Dreher Brewery, the largest brewery in Austria, in the hot, humid city of Trieste (now part of Italy).