Celebrating Alexander Carnegie Kirk's groundbreaking contributions to refrigeration and marine engineering.

For people, like me, of a certain age the phrase “To boldly go where no man has gone before,” conjures up a level of excitement and anticipation of the adventures of the starship Enterprise and its intrepid commander, James Tiberius Kirk. In the refrigeration world, however, we ought to celebrate another Kirk with a funny middle name, Alexander Carnegie Kirk.

Like his 24th century namesake, Kirk boldly did things that had never been done before but he seems to have been modest in his achievements and happy for others to take the limelight. His early career was spent as an apprentice in a Glasgow shipyard’s foundry with a reputation for building high-powered marine engines and in 1854 he moved to London as chief draftsman for the company who had made the engines for Brunel’s SS Great Western. After five years in London Kirk’s career took a sharp tack to starboard when he moved back to Scotland and joined chemist James Young at his shale oil works in the industrial area halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh. Young was one of the first to synthesize kerosene by the dry distillation of shale and Kirk developed an improved design of retort, which made the process commercially viable. At its peak the Scottish shale oil industry produced 90% of the world’s kerosene (known as paraffin in Britain) and substantially replaced whale oil as the preferred fuel for indoor lamps before electric light was introduced.

While working on the shale oil process Kirk found he had a need for an artificial cooling system to maintain process efficiency in summer. The refinery had already installed an early ethyl ether machine developed by William Harrison in Geelong, Australia, five years earlier, but Kirk was inspired to use air as the means to scale up the cooling capacity. Kirk’s machine worked on the same principle as Robert Stirling’s heat engine, but with the focus on driving the pistons to make a stream of air cold. With a pressure ratio of 2 in his early machine, he was able to achieve a temperature of 9°F (–13°C) and his first prototype ran for 10 years at the plant. For later models he increased the pressure ratio and was able to achieve –40°F (–40°C). This air cycle quickly became the preferred method of cooling, and 15 years later, one of Kirk’s colleagues at the refinery, James Coleman, produced an improved machine in collaboration with Sir William Thomson (ASHRAE Journal, June 2015). The Bell-Coleman machine was more compact and led the effort to ship refrigerated meats from Australia, New Zealand and South America.

Kirk didn’t stay at the refinery long enough to see this development. In 1865 he returned to marine engine manufacture in Glasgow, with succession of famous Clydeside shipyards, eventually returning to Napier’s where he served his apprenticeship almost 30 years earlier. At Napier’s he made perhaps his most notable development; the invention of the triple expansion marine engine that made steamships up to 25% more efficient and revolutionized marine engineering throughout the world for the next 75 years. Kirk’s early efforts were not promising and the Royal Navy was not keen to try this crazy new invention. However, despite his shy manner, Kirk showed a remarkable flair for marketing; telling the men from the British Admiralty that the Imperial Russian Navy had already ordered over 12,000 hp (8948 kW) of engines for its fleet. The Admiralty quickly placed an order for two, which exceeded its expectations in sea trials and so the future of the innovative technology was ensured.