Industrial Gases

Linde began with an academic problem: in the 1870s, Munich professor Carl von Linde was asked to improve the refrigeration used in breweries, and in 1877 he built the first reliable mechanical refrigeration machine — an invention that transformed the food and beer industries. From there, Linde moved into liquefying air itself, and that leap — separating oxygen, nitrogen, and argon from the atmosphere — created the modern industrial gas industry. Today Linde is the world's largest industrial gas company, supplying oxygen for steelmaking, nitrogen for electronics manufacturing, hydrogen for refineries, and the medical oxygen that hospitals rely on. Its on-site plants sit inside customer factories, producing gases continuously, while its pipelines serve industrial clusters; its electronics division supplies the ultra-high-purity gases and materials used in semiconductor fabrication. Linde's modern form came from the 2018 merger with US rival Praxair — one of the largest industrial mergers ever — creating a company with about 65,000 employees and annual revenue near US$33 billion. Based in Woking, UK (with US operations headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut), Linde competes with Air Liquide and Air Products, and its engineering arm still designs the air separation units that rival gas makers themselves buy.