“Gesellschaft für Linde’s Eismachinen AG” (“Linde’s Ice Machine Company”) is Founded
Prior to the establishment of his company, Carl Linde had already delivered 20 refrigeration units in Europe. He finally decided to give up his secure position as a college teacher and concentrate entirely on the marketing and further technical development of his refrigeration machines.
Carl Linde (1872)
Carl von Linde (1925)
Together with Karl Lang, a technological consultant and board member of a number of several breweries in the Rhineland, Banker Moritz von Hirsch, who provided the largest share of capital, and Gustav Jung, the owner of the Mainzer Aktienbrauerei, Linde founded the “Gesellschaft für Linde’s Eismaschinen AG”. As Jung’s brewery was located in Mainz, and there were a number of other breweries in the region as potential customers for Linde’s refrigeration units, Wiesbaden was selected as corporate headquarters. The young corporation was launched with very little capital and was made up only of Linde as CEO and a draftsman.
Linde did not do its own manufacturing but had the machines built by licensees. This soon provided the company with a sizable growth potential, which soon saw it becoming the most internationally important supplier of refrigeration technology. Early on, Linde issued licenses to foreign partners in France, Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austro-Hungary and the United States.
Starting in 1900, the “Low Temperature and Process Engineering” work group in Höllriegelskreuth near Munich, known today as “Linde Engineering” built process engineering equipment itself. Fifty years later, the company had sold 6,599 large-scale refrigeration machines to 17 countries and regions of the world, among them Argentina, China, Japan, Russia and Central America.
In 1965, the meanwhile old-fashioned sounding name “Gesellschaft für Linde’s Eismaschinen AG” changed to “Linde AG”.
Since the merger of Linde and BOC in 2006, the concern is now called “The Linde Group”.
