Profile · La Crosse, Wisconsin
Reuben Nicholas Trane
Co-founder of The Trane Company in La Crosse; inventor of the convector Heat Cabinet; company president 1916–1951
$1.3 million
Reuben Nicholas Trane co-founded The Trane Company in La Crosse in 1913 and turned a plumber’s radiator shop into a global heating-and-cooling manufacturer whose headquarters and main plant stayed on the river for his lifetime. Sales ran about fifty thousand dollars the year of incorporation and more than forty-five million by 1953. He was born in La Crosse on September 13, 1886, to James Trane, a Norwegian plumber who had opened on Pearl Street in 1885 and invented a low-pressure vapor heating system. After Central High, Reuben spent a year hauling his father’s cast-iron radiators up local stairwells and decided that was a stupid way to heat a building. He worked as a plumber’s helper, then paid for a Wisconsin mechanical-engineering degree by waiting tables and tending furnaces; he captained the crew. In 1913 he incorporated The Trane Company with James and his sister Stella. In a corner of Plant 1 he built copper tubes, fins, and a cabinet that behaved like a chimney: the Heat Cabinet, announced in a six-page 1926 trade-magazine ad, replaced the radiator with a convector (U.S. Patent 1,764,187). By 1930 there was a second factory and offices in England, Canada, Belgium, China, and Japan. Refrigerant cooling, the hermetic Turbovac, and the CenTraVac chiller followed; wartime work put Trane gear in aircraft and ships. He was president from 1916 to 1951, then chairman, and told people that if the choice were his he would rather lose the business than the engineers. He raised money for the La Crosse Home for Children and died in the city on September 5, 1954, at sixty-seven. A century after the Heat Cabinet ad he was named a 2026 National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee. Birth, company, and death were all La Crosse.