Herman Frasch

Herman Frasch was a German-born American chemist, mining engineer and inventor who emigrated to the United States as a teenager and built his career in petroleum refining and sulfur extraction. Working for Standard Oil from 1886, he discovered that mixing copper oxide into high-sulfur Canadian and American crude oil during distillation removed the sulfur impurities that had made it commercially unusable, and his patents on the process gave Standard Oil a profitable near-monopoly on refining that crude until 1905. He is best remembered for the Frasch process, patented on 20 October 1890, which recovered deeply buried sulfur deposits, such as those near what became Sulphur, Louisiana, by injecting superheated water down a well to melt the sulfur underground and pumping the resulting liquid to the surface. Frasch held 64 United States patents over his career and received the Perkin Medal in 1912.