[Welder Dave]

Air Products is another large industrial gas supplier. Praxair kept the Linde gas business. That's there major source of income. It gets really confusing though because BOC became a new but different Linde and it now it has another new name, Messer I think. Linde is name of the person who invented the air separation process Union Carbide used. It's hard to keep track of all the different buy outs and name changes. Air Liquide bought out Airgas because they wanted more US distribution. Apparently when they tried running welding supply outlets in the US they failed miserably. They did to sell to large operations such as NASA though. Air Liquide is the largest industrial gas supplier in the world now. They and Praxair used to be pretty close but after acquiring Airgas took a pretty big lead.