Today, MCI wants to celebrate the life and inventions of the Scottish inventor James Dewar. James Dewar was a scientist who worked with liquefaction of gases and was the inventor of the thermos flask. Dewar was born in in 1842 Kincardine, not far from MCI’s workshops in Falkirk. He went to the University of Edinburgh where he studied Chemistry.
It wasn’t long before our local hero became a professor at the University of Cambridge. His academic work and inventions covered a wide range of disciplines, from being part of a team that invented a smoke-free gunpowder alternative, writing many academic papers on organic chemistry and hydrogen, spectroscopic observations and, of course, liquefaction of so-called permanent gases.
In 1891, he developed a machine that could produce liquid oxygen in industrial quantities. In 1892, he developed a vessel to hold these gases. The vacuum flask. The makers of the flask patented the idea before Dewar. Although this was Dewar’s most famous invention, he was tragically robbed the right to make it.
In any event, Dewar led an exemplary academic career. His work has been essential in the field of cryogenics and the gases which hold the gases are held in a special flask called a cryogenics storage dewar, or dewar for short.