#11: Frederick McKinley Jones – Refrigerated Truck
Your grocery store’s year-round bounty of fresh fruit and produce owes a serious debt to Frederick McKinley Jones. In 1940, he invented the first practical, automatic refrigeration system for trucks. Before his Thermo King system, perishables traveled short distances packed in ice, if they traveled at all. Jones’s invention launched the age of the “reefer” truck, making long-haul food transport possible. He racked up over 60 patents, mostly in refrigeration, and became the first Black man elected to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
