History's Headlines: Leonard Parker Pool's empire of gas

Historian

Who in the Lehigh Valley has not heard of Air Products, the multinational corporation that recently moved to a new headquarters and is almost as closely identified with the area as Bethlehem Steel once was? Thanks to the many philanthropic ties it has with the health field, it is also well known in that sector. But the story of how it all started, and its visionary founder Leonard Parker Pool, is not as well-known as it once was.

“Invent a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door,” so the old axiom goes. Thomas Edison gave us the light bulb, Alexander Graham Bell the telephone and Leonard Pool a revolution in the use of industrial gases that, coupled with a superior sense of salesmanship that didn’t take no for an answer, and a visionary self-confidence, led to Air Products.

Pool’s midwestern family’s roots were in railroads. His grandfather, Ira G. Pool, was superintendent of the Soo Railroad shops in Minneapolis, a combination of several upper midwestern railroads that eventually were merged under that name. His father and several of his uncles and half-brothers joined Ira in the railroad shops, eventually rising to management positions on the railroad. Pool’s father, known as L.J. Pool, met and married Emma Ludford of London, England in 1890. They were to have 7 children of which Leonard was the fourth born in 1906. Leonard Pool was an excellent student in school. But family problems made his dream to become a doctor fade. Finally, to help support his ill, aging father, he dropped out of high school and went to work in the Eire Railroad’s shops where he got a first-hand knowledge of metalworking, oxyacetylene cutting and welding, which perhaps planted an idea in his mind.

Most people associate the 1920s with gangsters, Prohibition, the Charleston, and Lindbergh’s solo flight to Paris. For Leonard Pool it was the decade of the pancake. His sales skills were honed by selling Pillsbury flour to restaurants and retail outlets. As a good salesman he was allowed to pick his territory. After studying population figures he decided that Detroit, with its increasing number of autoworkers, was a great place to sell pancakes. All those workers turning out Model A Fords would want to eat lots of pancakes. But by 1929 Pool was getting tired of the pancake circuit.

Leonard Pool in 1957

So, with his knowledge of welding he went to work for the C.H. Dockson Company, which assembled and sold welding equipment. Working with the Dockson’s son, Sterling, he combined his skills as a salesman with technical knowledge of welding. Later he joined Harrison Bird of Burdett Oxygen. Soon Pool was traveling, selling resold welding and cutting equipment and gases as he traveled. But the arrival of the Great Depression caused a slowdown in business.

For Pool the biggest thing in his life at that time was his courtship with Dorothy Rider. A teacher of French in Detroit public schools, her father was a wealthy businessman and investor. But Rider herself was a frugal, down-to-earth person. After their marriage on December 19, 1931 she played a quiet but important role both in Pool’s life and the establishment of Air Products.

In the 1930s, Pool rented a warehouse in Detroit and created the Acetylene Gas and Supply Company, which he sold to Compressed Industrial Gases in late 1938 and he became manager of railroad sales in Chicago for that company. By the decade’s end, the Pools were doing well. The death of Dorothy Pool’s father left her with an estate worth nearly $100,000. Thanks to his stock in CIG and his salary, Pool was able to support his mother and help his brother Walter through medical school at the University of Michigan.

But despite his status Pool was restless. In the spring of 1939, he came up with an idea that would eventually lead to the creation of Air Products. In the company’s official history “Out of Thin Air” author Andrew J. Butrica describes it this way:

“Industry practice was to generate oxygen in gaseous form at a centrally located plant, and to distribute it in cylinders. Pool’s simple and ingenious idea was to avoid the cost of shipping heavy cylinders by building inexpensive generators that could be installed on the site where the gas would be utilized. Pool did not stop there. He reasoned that customers could be persuaded to lease those on-site plants, paying for the oxygen they consumed as a metered rate. In a final, elegant touch he anticipated providing an incentive to stimulate demand: the more oxygen a customer used, the cheaper the rate would be. Everyone would be happy. By eliminating the cost of shipping cylinders, the charges would be a great deal less. Meanwhile, Pool himself would enjoy a steady revenue from the leases. In short, Pool reasoned he would keep the ‘cow’ --the oxygen plant—on the customers’ premises and sell the ‘milk’—the oxygen—on the spot.”

To get the generators he needed he brought in a young engineer named Frank Pavlis and some workers and the process was completed but not without effort. “It was a sort of nightmare; I still wonder how we did it…” Pavlis later recalled. Another engineer, Carl Anderson, who had a great deal of experience in the field, joined Pool in 1940. At first his expectations were low. But Pool won him over to his vision: “Leonard was a wonderful salesman, a very positive salesman. When he told you something he made you believe he was telling you the truth. He was very positive about what he wanted done and how to do it. He didn’t always know how to do it, but he knew someone like me could do it if I got down to work.”

Leonard Pool

With World War II on the horizon, the company was given the name Air Products in 1940, in part because of Anderson’s suggestion. Pool knew in 1941 with the passage of the Lend Lease Act there would be a demand for steel and a demand for oxygen from the military. In June of that year Pool and Anderson and their wives went down to Dayton, Ohio to the Army Air Force national procurement base at Wright Field. An earlier effort to interest the military had consisted of “don’t call us and we will call you” responses. But Pool was not to be put off. Getting ahold of a base telephone directory he began to make a rapid series of calls to every part of the base he could find a listing for. Finally, Captain Robert Turner, an engineering officer, picked up the phone. When he found out who it was, he exclaimed, “we have been looking all over for Anderson,” because of Anderson’s known expertise with generators. With that a deal was soon in the works. Pool knew that all the Army Air Force fields all over the country and those overseas would soon need oxygen generators. Turner thought the Air Products generators were just what he was looking for and gave the company a $51,000 development contract. ”At last, “ the official history notes, “Air Products had an order for an oxygen generator.” Part of the deal included a $14,000 loan from Pool’s wife, on which she got 6 percent interest.

With that foot in the door and Anderson’s solid reputation the process began. With the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war the company went from the edge of bankruptcy to major profits as demand for Air Products equipment skyrocketed. As the war continued Air Products was called on by the military to modify their equipment in a variety of situations.

It became clear that Air Products could no longer continue to operate from a back room in Leonard Pool’s brother Walter’s mortuary school. The War Production Board offered the company several other sites and Pool selected Chattanooga, Tennessee. The government financed the move and by May 1944 Air Products had 230 employees and was looking for more.

Like everyone else Leonard Pool was happy with the end of World War II. But he was not happy with what it meant for Air Products. He turned down offers to sell the company. But as Butrica notes, during the years from 1945 to 1957 Pool “would struggle to develop a business strategy,” and “and for some years following the war… the outcome was in serious doubt.”

As the years passed, what helped save Air Products included its growth overseas in Great Britain. Pool was particularly friendly with one British executive. Although it was a time when ration restrictions were still in place in Britain in Christmas of 1950, he sent gifts for his family that included record albums for “South Pacific” and “Kiss me Kate” and much-coveted nylon stockings for the executive’s wife and daughters.

Air Products in the 1920's

Others like Edward Donley were to create the modern Air Products. The more important thing locally of course was the move of Air Products in 1946 from Chattanooga to Emmaus. The company took up a facility that been that of the old Donaldson Iron Works, which had provided the tubes for New York’s Holland Tunnel. It was not an easy move and cost the company in profits, but it was done.

Later it would move on to Trexlertown where Pool himself selected the design of the buildings. ‘’The architecture of the original Trexlertown buildings, fastidiously overseen by Leonard Pool, reflected neither opulence nor a feeling of self-importance, but the simple stark values of the engineering side of the corporate culture,” writes Butrica.

By the early 1960s Air Products had its feet firmly planted in the growing Space Age oriented economy of the time. In 1962 Leonard Pool proudly hailed Air Products’ listing on the New York Stock Exchange. But the decade of the so-called Soaring Sixties brought tragedy to Pool with the death on March 23, 1967 of his wife Dorothy. Unfortunately, her death led to a huge legal battle when three local hospitals- Allentown Hospital, Allentown Osteopathic and Sacred Heart- fought Pool’s plans to create a major teaching hospital in his wife’s memory.

In 1972 Pool had a stroke and was briefly unable to talk. On December 27, 1975 Leonard Pool died in his sleep. His will established a $20 million dollar trust in his wife’s name, the Dorothy Rider Pool Health Care Trust.

With the planned termination of the trust approaching in 2025, its trustees and Lehigh Valley Health Network have created the Leonard Parker Pool Institute for Health to carry on Pool’s legacy. And of course, Air Products itself continues to grow from the vision of Leonard Pool and those pioneers that worked by his side.

The Upper Macungie Township-based maker of industrial gases will serve a fleet of five Toyota Mirai fuel-cell vehicles at Edmonton International Airport from a mobile hydrogen-refueler.

Historian

Becoming partly cloudy; a dry and comfortable night.

Becoming partly cloudy; a dry and comfortable night.

Sunshine mixing with clouds; pleasantly warm and comfortable. A t-storm possible towards the I-81 corridor towards sunset.

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