Abelló Linde Centenary Book

Catalonia was still the “workshop of Spain”, as it had been described since
the mid-19 th century. But something was changing in an economy that had been
characterised by being concentrated in the textile sector. “The period that began in
1891 and ran to the beginning of the First World War is marked by the signs of
diversification of the productive process, especially the secondary and tertiary
sectors.” 2 Chemicals, metallurgy, building materials, the graphic arts and publishing
began to catch up on the high percentages of the textile sector in relation to
industrial production as a whole. Indeed chemicals, which had been a sector
considered as auxiliary to the major economic sectors, forged its own personality
in an immense range of products and specialities.
They were years of great technological breakthroughs in Europe and the
United States. Breakthroughs in which it was still the individuals, the geniuses,
who made science take steps forward, through continued investigation that took
as its point of departure what other geniuses had achieved. Some of these
geniuses got no further than the testing laboratory, as they had neither the will
nor the ability to develop the application of their discoveries or inventions. Others,
in contrast, moved comfortably in both worlds and created the companies
necessary to be able to profit industrially and financially from their laboratory
experiments.
LINDE, THE GERMAN GENIUS
Carl von Linde belonged to the class of geniuses who were able to
profit from their discovery. This was why a leading scientist lent his
name to a great multinational company.
In 1896 a small air liquefaction
plant by Linde was presented at the Bavarian
Agriculture, Industry and Trade Exhibition
in Nuremberg
Carl von Linde was born in Berndorf – Upper Franconia – in 1842. He
studied engineering at the Zurich Polytechnic; he worked from 1864 with Professor
Borsig in Berlin and later with Professor Krauss Maffei in Munich. In that city he
was a supernumerary (1868) and permanent (1872) teacher of machine theory at
the Higher Technical School.
His earliest research was centred on refrigeration. As a result of this, on
June 21 st 1879 he set up a company in Wiesbaden with quite a graphic name:
Gesellschaft für Linde’s Eismaschinen: the Linde Ice Machine Company. These
machines were chiefly meant for breweries, abattoirs and ice factories, and they
were the ones Isidro Abelló became familiar with during his travels around Europe.
In 1885 the first subsidiary of the company outside Germany was established, in
London, the Linde British Refrigeration Company, to be followed by others.
2. Maluquer de Motes, J.: Història Econòmica de la Catalunya Contemporània, Enciclopèdia Catalana,
vol. 1, Barcelona, 1994, p. 261.
30 Isidro Abelló and the German genius. The oxygen industry