MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — Thermo King held a special dedication and ribbon-cutting ceremony this week for its newly renovated research and development facility at its Minneapolis headquarters.

The Frederick McKinley Jones Research and Development Center is named after an instrumental figure in the founding of Thermo King.

A self-taught, African-American engineer who was born in 1893, Jones overcame diversity his entire life to design and build electronic innovations that forever impacted the world. His ideas helped create the transport refrigeration industry. Jones developed the first transport refrigeration unit in 1938, the same year Thermo King was founded.

Thermo King’s $7.1 million dollar investment in the company’s quality and reliability testing capabilities, which includes facility updates and new equipment, is a tribute to Jones’ dedication to creating innovative, reliable products.

By having state-of-the-art processes and tools for product quality, reliability, life verification and validation, the Frederick McKinley Jones Research and Development Center can provide customers with tangible value through testing and engineering services, says Ted Fick, president, Transport Solutions Americas.

More than $5 million was put into new testing equipment and capabilities over the past two years, including an electro dynamic shaker, calorimeter and environmentally controlled chambers for compressor life testing, a unit endurance testing cells and environmental chambers.

Thermo King, a business unit of Ingersoll-Rand Co. Ltd., was founded in 1938 and manufactures transport temperature control systems for a variety of mobile applications, including trailers, truck bodies, buses, shipboard containers and railway cars.