In this age of short product lifecycles and rapid obsolescence it is nice to see an example of longevity. We consider equipment or tools old when over ten years in service. How about a century?
Our CO₂ is delivered in standard industrial pressure cylinders. These steel cylinders hold 50lbs of liquid CO₂ at a pressure sufficient to keep it liquid at room temperature, about or about 800PSI.
These standard cylinders require inspection every five years, and the inspection date is stamped into the steel at the top of the cylinder in the format month-year with a two digit year. It has been this way for a long time, longer than I realized.
I have on any number of occasions seen cylinders that began life during the huge industrial expansion of WWII, about 80 years ago, often with markings of USN or similar on them and dates in the early 1940’s. They were likely sold off as war surplus and have spent the decades in the service of various commercial users since.
The cylinder I was hooking up last week is older yet, the first inspection date from 1921! Yes, this cylinder has been in service for well over a century. There may even be an older date under one of the stickers.
No, the cylinder did not spend decades languishing unused in a warehouse somewhere, there is a complete set of regular inspection dates spanning the decades stamped into the steel. Nearly the entire top of the cylinder is covered with inspection stamps.
It is possible there are even older cylinders still in service. Seamless steel cylinders for compressed gas were first introduced in 1890 by the Mannesmann Company in Germany.
Cylinders of this type were also manufactured by Linde, a company founded in Germany in 1879 specializing in refrigeration. In the following years the firm developed methods to compress and cool air to extract constituent gasses such as CO₂ and oxygen. This work led to the first large scale air separation plant installed near Munich in 1903, necessitating the manufacture of compressed gas cylinders to store these products.
This particular cylinder appears to have been manufactured by a subsidiary, Linde Air Products that was started in 1907 to serve the US market. I can see no reason this cylinder will not continue to serve, it is in excellent shape. No doubt the valve has been replaced a time or two, it looks newer. In time we will use the gas inside and return it to Airgas to be refilled.
How long will it continue? Another century?
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