Unknown Heroes: Carl von Linde

A German engineer with Swedish origins and a Lutheran background, Carl von Linde is the inventor of the refrigeration cycle—the technology behind your air conditioner, but also every refrigerator and freezer, both in homes and in stores, warehouses and reefers.

One of the pillars of food distribution is the cold chain, which prevents perishable goods such as frozen food from going bad. Creating cold is impossible: all you can do is remove heat, which requires the refrigeration cycle.

Refrigeration is also vital for many other things, such as medicine, biotech, agriculture, computing (cooling down datacenters and even quantum computers) and countless other industries.

His invention thus completely revolutionized our lives, as without it, you would have no fridge, no freezer, no A/C, no sensitive medicine, and many industries would simply not exist.