Industry History | Air Products — On-Site Oxygen After a Detroit Warehouse
· 1940
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Industry History | Air Products — On-Site Oxygen After a Detroit Warehouse
kevin
People treat Air Products as a Trexlertown campus that always piped hydrogen to a refinery fence.
The first company sold the generator, not the cylinder.
In 1940 Leonard Parker Pool founded Air Products in Detroit on a simple reversal of the industrial-gas trade.
The trade hauled heavy cylinders from a central plant. Pool wanted a small oxygen plant built at the customer's own floor, leased, and metered.
Frank E. Pavlis, still finishing a University of Michigan engineering master's, became the first employee at three dollars a day and was told to design the machine he would then have to build.
Pool's wife lent fourteen thousand dollars at 6 percent to close the first generator order.
In 1941 the firm leased its first commercial unit to a small Detroit steel company.
War work then swallowed the book. Air Products designed mobile generators that made oxygen for high-altitude military flights.
In 1944 the shop moved to Chattanooga and built 240 generators for the armed forces and for Lend-Lease.
After the war the lease on the Tennessee floor ran out. Pool bought 25,000 square feet in the closed Donaldson Iron Works machine shop in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, for seventy-five thousand dollars.
On 7 May 1946 Air Products opened there with 140 people, close to Bethlehem Steel, PPL and Lehigh Portland Cement.
Headquarters later shifted a few miles west to Trexlertown and Allentown.
The mechanism that survived is still Pool's 1940 idea: put the plant on the customer's ground and charge for the molecule, not the bottle.
Photo: Allentown skyline, via Wikimedia Commons.
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