Finance History | Air Products Boulevard, Trexlertown — Oxygen Metered at the Customer's Door

People treat Air Products as an Allentown campus and a ticker for industrial gas.

The idea that built the firm was not a new molecule. It was a way to stop shipping cylinders.

Leonard Parker Pool founded Air Products in Detroit in 1940. Industry practice then made oxygen at a central plant and sent it out in heavy bottles.

Pool's plan was to put a small generator on the customer's ground and sell the gas by the meter.

The customer leased the plant. The more oxygen used, the lower the unit price.

Immediate commercial orders were scarce. In 1941 the firm leased its first generator to a Detroit steel company, then turned the same machines toward wartime demand.

By 1944 the works had moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to build mobile and stationary oxygen generators for Allied air forces. After the war the company needed a civilian market and a cheaper plant.

On 7 May 1946 Air Products opened in a former machine shop of the Donaldson Iron Works in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, with 140 employees. The Lehigh Valley sat beside steel, cement, and power customers who already burned gas.

Within fifteen years operations spread through Emmaus, Wilkes-Barre, and Allentown, then consolidated on this greenfield campus in Trexlertown, Upper Macungie Township. The 2014 photograph shows that headquarters before the firm built a newer campus a mile away at 1940 Air Products Boulevard.

Air Products and Chemicals later listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker APD. The stock sits in the S and P 500.

The pin is the public edge of the Trexlertown campus. The plant interiors are working gas facilities.

The mechanism is a lease that turned oxygen from a shipped commodity into a metered utility, paid for at the point of use.

Photo: CyberXRef, 9 March 2014, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Air Products headquarters, Trexlertown.