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The King of Cool

Frederick McKinley Jones was born in 1893 in Covington, Kentucky, to an Irish father and African-American mother. He was an orphan by the time he was nine. He left school after sixth grade and took a job as a garage cleaner at age 11. He was promoted from cleaner to automobile mechanic by age 14, and later to garage foreman.

In 1912 he moved to Hallock, Minnesota, where he worked as a mechanic on a 50,000-acre farm owned by James J. Hill. Jones stayed in Hallock for 20 years, later saying it was a place “where a man … [was] judged more on his character and ability than on the color of his skin.”

During World War I, Jones served in an all-Black unit in the U.S. Army. He used his mechanical skills to equip his camp with electricity, telegraph and telephone service, and earned a promotion to sergeant. Back in Hallock after the war, Jones built a transmitter for the town’s first radio station and invented a device to add sound to motion pictures.

Entrepreneur Joseph Numero hired Jones in 1927 as an electrical engineer to improve the audio equipment made by his Minneapolis firm Cinema Supplies Inc. Jones developed methods for converting silent-movie projectors to add sound and patented a ticket-dispensing machine for movie theaters.

In part to win a $6 bet with a friend who owned a shipping company, Numero asked Jones to create a portable refrigeration system that would keep food fresh in transit. Jones built three prototypes, using junkyard salvage for materials. His third, the Model C, was compact, light, and resistant to vibration. Numero and Jones founded Thermo King in the late 1930s.

Their first major customer was the U.S. armed forces, which used Thermo King equipment to preserve blood, medicine and food for use in army hospitals and battlefields during World War II. By 1949 Thermo King was a $3 million business, supplying portable cooling units to commercial customers. The company has been an industry leader ever since.

Fred Jones earned 61 patents during his lifetime; 40 of them were related to refrigeration. His nicknames included “Father of Refrigerated Transportation” and “King of Cool.”

We see two lessons in this story. If you’re a manager or mentor, look at talent and initiative, not just credentials. And if you’re an engineer or scientist, remember that you can be a leader through the power of your ideas.

Elaine and I often stress that leadership is not exclusive to position power. You don’t need a C-level title and a corner office to make valuable contributions. But sometimes a top executive is also a great leader.

Ken Iverson took Nucor Steel from near collapse to the forefront of the industry. He believed that giving employees a say in decisions—and a stake in outcomes—would provide sufficient motivation for them to perform.

Three items from his 1998 memoir Plain Talk come to mind:

• Iverson said Nucor’s 7,000 employees were the best paid workers in the industry, but that Nucor had the lowest labor cost per ton of steel produced. This is not a conflict but the result of linking individual employee compensation to company results.
• When Plain Talk was published, Nucor was a Fortune 500 company with sales of more than $3.6 billion. Yet it had only 22 people working at corporate headquarters, and just four layers of management from the CEO to the front-line workers.
• When American steelmaking was least profitable, roughly half the people in the industry lost their jobs—yet Nucor had no layoffs. All employees took pay cuts, with the largest reductions taken by Iverson and his leadership team. They shared the pain.

Those three examples show incentives and opportunities for all employees, a flat organizational structure that gave people in the company greater access to each other, and a commitment by executive management to align their fortunes with those of all other employees.

Iverson clearly believed in doing fewer things and doing them well. Even though the book is nearly 30 years old, it’s still worth reading today.

We recently wrote about Lyda Hill Philanthropies and its IF/THEN® initiative. Today we want to draw your attention to an exhibit the organization created a few years ago.

To raise the profile of women in STEM careers, IF/THEN commissioned more than 120 life-sized statues to be made at once. Using 3D scanning and printing technologies, the project exhibited the largest collection of women statues ever assembled. In 2020, the statues were displayed all together at NorthPark Center in Dallas in 2021 and at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, in 2022.

Since then, the statues have been moved to multiple locations across the United States. To find one near you, visit the exhibit site. That page also features profiles of the women honored in the exhibit. To see how the statues were made, watch this short video from Miranda Cosgrove and the CBS program Mission Unstoppable.

One of the most valuable skills of any scientist or engineer is the ability to look at a problem from different perspectives. Having everyone think alike just brings more of the same answers. Diverse teams often come up with more creative and more effective solutions. The same principle applies to leadership.

Women were historically discouraged from studying technical fields or pursuing leadership positions. In our books and on this site we profile some of the women who followed their talents and interests anyway: Dianne Chong, Jan Hansen, Katy Kolbeck and Jill Gugisberg Wall. These four are great examples of innovative thinking and entrepreneurship.

Today we also want to recognize an organization dedicated to creating opportunities for girls and women in science and engineering. IF/THEN® empowers STEM innovators and drives cultural change so the next generation is inspired to solve our biggest global challenges.

Please set aside some time to read about Lyda Hill Philanthropies and its mission of social impact through culture change. The site should inspire you. It definitely inspires us.

Photo by Carol M. Highsmith (Public Domain)

Did you ever try to solve a problem you thought was technical only to find it wasn’t? How did you figure out what was really happening? Did it reveal a gap in your training?

Sometimes the question is not “what is the answer” but “what is the question.”

In 1992 the National Society of Professional Engineers asked employers and educators what skills engineers need to do their jobs and how well prepared they are. Here’s what they found:

Graduates were well prepared in math and science, as expected. But they fell short in areas like teamwork, social/ethical/environmental issues, integrative thinking, design and leadership. The skills they had were necessary but not sufficient.

Since then, the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Engineering Leadership Development Division (LEAD) has promoted leadership education in academic programs, and the accrediting body ABET has included leadership in its Student Outcomes criteria.

That gap inspired us to create our Leadership for Engineers capstone course and the two books that followed. Our goal is to help individuals learn and grow, and to transform STEM education and technical careers.

And that begins with asking what the question really is.

The Minnesota State Fair has come and gone, and with it STEM Day 2025. We had great guests, visitors and conversations. Jan Hansen, Jill Wall, Katy Kolbeck and Arnie Weimerskirch answered questions and offered suggestions on a wide range of subjects. People who enjoy what they do and love sharing it with others make any field more interesting and rewarding.

A visit from trailblazing STEM educator AnnMarie Thomas was an unexpected treat. We hope to write a feature on her soon. For now, we recommend you visit her website and see more ways STEM education can be innovative, creative and exciting.

AnnMarie Thomas, Jill Gugisberg Wall, Jan Hansen

STEM Day at the Minnesota State Fair, presented by SciMathMN, is scheduled for Thursday, August 21.

Visit our booth in Dan Patch Park on the Fairgrounds in front of the Grandstand. Stop by any time, or plan to meet some of the leaders featured here and in The Engineer’s Guide to Authentic Leadership.

Meet Katy Kolbeck at 9 a.m.,, Jill Wall at 11 a.m., Jan Hansen at 1 p.m. and Arnie Weimerskirch by video at 3 p.m. Bring your questions!

Discounts on copies of the book will be available, and proceeds will support the University of St. Thomas School of Engineering Leadership Fund.

Read more about STEM Day.

See you there!

SciMathMN STEM Day at the Minnesota State Fair is a celebration of all things science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This year, STEM Day is opening day — Thursday, August 21.

Some of the leaders featured in The Engineer’s Guide to Authentic Leadership and on this site will be there in person: Katy Kolbeck, Jill Wall and Jan Hansen. Arnie Weimerskirch will be there virtually. Read their stories and bring your own questions, or meet them first and then read their stories. The booth will be in Dan Patch Park on the Fairgrounds in front of the Grandstand.

Discounts on copies of the book will be available, and proceeds will support the University of St. Thomas School of Engineering Leadership Fund.

Read more about STEM Day and the Minnesota State Fair. See you there!