The Intercooler on the intercooler

We thought the launch of The Intercooler website, which goes live at midday tomorrow, was as good an excuse as any to ask the question – what is an intercooler? And who invented it?

Now, regular readers of the Breakthrough series – where Andrew and Dan foolishly let Joana Fidalgo and me off the leash, like a couple of engineering puppies allowed to gambol around in an endless meadow of geekery, with the thinly veiled excuse of explaining the greatest technical breakthroughs in the history of the automobile – might reasonably have guessed that the intercooler would eventually pop up there.

But it’s not going to, partly because it does not quite have the long-lasting industrial impact of some of the other technologies that we’ve selected, and partly because it’s usually more of a backing band to the main act of the turbocharger. But we’ve decided to dedicate a piece to the intercooler anyway, firstly because, well, it’s our name dammit, and secondly, it allows us to talk a little about a truly fascinating character – Frank Lockhart.