Linde was a member of scientific and engineering associations, including being on the board of trustees of the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Born in Berndorf [de], Bavaria[2] as the son of a German-born minister and a Swedish mother, he was expected to follow in his father's footsteps but took another direction entirely.

Von Linde's family moved to Munich in 1854, and eight years later he started a course in engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland, where his teachers included Rudolf Clausius, Gustav Zeuner and Franz Reuleaux.

In 1864, he was expelled before graduating for participating in a student protest, but Reuleaux found him a position as an apprentice at the Kottern cotton-spinning plant in Kempten.

Linde stayed only a short time before moving first to Borsig in Berlin and then to the new Krauss locomotive factory in Munich, where he worked as head of the technical department.

[3] In 1868 Linde learned of a new university opening in Munich (the Technische Hochschule) and immediately applied for a job as a lecturer; he was accepted—at the age of 26—for the position.

After a decade, Linde withdrew from managerial activities to refocus on research, and in 1895 he succeeded in liquefying air by first compressing it and then letting it expand rapidly, thereby cooling it.

In the early days of oxygen production, the biggest use by far for the gas was the oxyacetylene torch, invented in France in 1903, which revolutionized metal cutting and welding in the construction of ships, skyscrapers, and other iron and steel structures.