BOC (company)
company
BOC Limited is a British based multinational, industrial gas company based in Woking, England. Since 2006, it has been a subsidiary of Linde plc.
History
Brin's Oxygen Company was formed in 1886, by two French brothers, Arthur and Léon Brin. In the early years, the company manufactured oxygen using a high-temperature barium oxide process, known as the Brin process, developed from the work of French scientist Jean-Baptiste Boussingault. The main application for gaseous oxygen at that time was in connection with the generation of limelight, used in magic lanterns and theatre lighting. BOC was the first company to produce oxygen on a commercial scale, and initially found it difficult to find customers outside of the limelight lighting sector.
Around 1903, a major new market emerged via the development of the oxyacetylene welding process. Around the same time, new cryogenic air separation processes had been devised independently in the UK, the United States and Germany. The German engineer and founder of the Linde Group, Carl von Linde, was awarded the patent for the process. The Brin brothers negotiated an agreement to use the Linde patents.
“BOC (company)” enters the record as company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what company can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q900198. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2006, 1886 and 1903.
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This entry incorporates text from “BOC (company)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.