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Skip to main content. Although oxygen had been used in an extremely limited capacity since the late 18th century as a respiratory agent, the development of chemically produced oxygen was hampered by costly methods, yielding only small amounts of relatively impure gases.
Commercially produced oxygen was largely confined to "limelight," used to illuminate the stages of theaters and music halls, and that popular means of entertainment and enlightenment, the lantern lecture. In two French brothers and chemists, Arthur and Leon Quentin Brin, traveled to the Inventions Exhibition in South Kensington, London, and erected a demonstration of their recently patented method of making oxygen by heating barium oxide, with a view to attracting financial support. They found it in Henry Sharp, an English stoneware manufacturer.
In the spring of the fledgling company hired its first foreman, a young Scotsman by the name of Kenneth Sutherland Murray. A man of remarkable mechanical ingenuity, Murray redesigned the plant in his first year on the job. In the new plant went into operation and production increased from nearly , to , cubic feet of oxygen. One year later the plant installed an automatic gear, invented by Murray, and improved Brin's production to nearly a million cubic feet of oxygen a year.
From the beginning, however, limelight was a limited market, and so the company board members searched for new ideas to develop oxygen sales. They promoted the use of oxygen in preserving milk, bleaching sugar, manufacturing saccharine, vinegar and linoleum, maturing whisky, and in the production of iron and steel. They hired a horse and carriage for the express purpose of "pushing business. As a result, sales of oxygenated water in any form, flavored or not, increased dramatically.
Moreover, the beverage found favor among temperance groups. The company published signed physicians' testimonials extolling the virtues of this new "health" drink, prescribing it as a sort of universal remedy. The company then turned its attention to the means of gas containment and distribution. The early method of storing and distributing gas, the gas bag, was an inefficient method which resulted in a significant loss of both gas and profit, and was soon replaced by the sturdier iron cylinder.
However, even with this vast improvement over the gas bag, the new method of containment was cumbersome and costly. The cylinder itself weighed and cost more than the gas it held, making the product economically impractical to distribute over a large geographical area. Consequently, in , under the guiding hand of Henry Sharp, Brin's began granting licenses to a handful of independent companies throughout Great Britain to produce oxygen under the patented Brin process.
In Brin's introduced another improvement in containment, a steel cylinder, which soon became the standard of gas containment worldwide, and expanded its production to related products, such as valves and fittings. At the same time, in a move that marked the beginning of the company's international growth, Brin's began exporting oxygen in cylinders to Australia for medical use, and developed plants in France, Germany and the United States, granting them sole rights to operate under the Brin process.
In the decade that followed, Brin's did little more than consolidate its operations and improve its market share. The company took over two of the British companies which had been granted licenses earlier to produce its product.
The company also elected its second chairman, Edward Badouin Ellice-Clark. After several years into his chairmanship, Ellice-Clark expressed some regret that the industry had produced no advances in the application of industrial oxygen. By , however, a new method of producing oxygen by converting air to liquid had been devised independently in Britain, the United States and Germany.
The German scientist reached a patent office first, and the patent went to Dr. Carl von Linde. Brin's almost immediately negotiated an agreement to use the Linde patents and within several years abandoned both its now dated barium oxide method of oxygen production and the company name.
There followed steady expansion spurred by development of new technologies using oxygen in metal cutting and welding. In Britain declared war on Germany, and business increased significantly. No previous war had equaled the output of munitions, and the essential element of oxygen was apparent in almost every aspect of munitions production. Every means of transport, including ships, tanks and trucks, involved either metal cutting or welding, usually both. BOC continued to grow in the immediate post-World War I years through acquisitions and through development in the commercial use of products such as acetylene and the rare gases.
These various gases, with their exotic sounding names of argon, krypton, helium, neon and xenon, were developed and marketed for use in such products as the neon light, fog lamps, miner's lamps, respiratory gas in obstetric analgesia, and as protection for divers against the "bends.
A major producer of small arms munitions during World War I, Sparklets had originally formed for the purpose of manufacturing small bulbs of carbon dioxide for carbonated drinks. In Kenneth Sutherland Murray, the company's first foreman, was appointed chairman.
As an adjunct to its admittedly limited production of medical oxygen, and in response to a request by the National Birthday Trust Fund, BOC designed a machine for use by midwives in called the "Queen Charlotte's Gas-Air Analgesia Apparatus. That same year, in a pioneering accomplishment, the company set up a separate medical division equipped to install oxygen which would be available "on tap" by means of an extensive circuit of copper pipes connecting hospital wards and operating theaters to a battery of cylinders usually located in the basement of a hospital.
Four years later, the company developed a machine which was the forerunner of surgical anesthetic equipment in use today. Linde, which has been stalking BOC for several years, insists the BOC takeover should clear any regulatory hurdles because there is no geographical overlap between the two groups' activities, with the British company particularly active in Asia.
Sources said Linde would take over the management. The agreed takeover is a notable success for Mr Reitzle, a flamboyant executive with a celebrity profile in the German media after his stints at BMW and Ford and his long-standing partnership with a newsreader.
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