Little is known of his life other than he began his career as an industrial chemist with Young’s Paraffin, Light and Mineral Oil Company in central Scotland.
He was a Fellow of the Chemical Institute and a member of the Glasgow Philosophical Society.
In 1877 he was approached by Henry and James Bell, brothers in the shipping company John Bell & Sons, and asked to create a refrigeration process for delivering beef across the Atlantic. This was patented later that year.[2] Together they formed a new company, the Bell-Coleman Mechanical Refrigeration Company, in the same year. In 1879 they fitted out the first ship with the equipment and began trading. This was the SS Circassia. In 1880/81 at the request of New Zealand investors the sailing ship Dunedin was re-equipped as a refrigerated ship and became the first financially successful vessel as a freezer ship.[3] The Bell brothers also took the new technology to the High Street, opening a series of butcher shops across Britain selling chilled meat also from 1879. This quickly grew, and within ten years they had 330 premises.
In the 1880s the Bell-Coleman Company is listed as having offices at 45 West Nile Street in the centre of Glasgow and J J Coleman was living at Fern Villa in Bothwell.[4]
Coleman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1886, and addressed the Society on his new process.[5] His proposers as a Fellow included Lord Kelvin, John Gray McKendrick, James Thomson Bottomley and Sir James Dewar.[6]
He died on 18 December 1888.
