Eugene Houdry

French born mechanical engineer, born in 1892 in Domont, France, and died in 1962 in Pennsylvania, who became a naturalized United States citizen in 1942 after his major refining work was already under way. Houdry graduated first in his class in mechanical engineering from the Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Arts et Metiers in 1911 and, after service in the First World War, turned to fuel research in the 1920s. He developed the Houdry Process, a method of catalytic cracking that used a solid catalyst to break heavy hydrocarbon oils down into lighter fractions similar to gasoline, producing far higher yields of high octane fuel than earlier thermal cracking methods. The first full scale Houdry Process unit began operating at Sun Oil Company's refinery in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, in 1937, and the process became a critical source of the high octane aviation fuel used by Allied air forces during the Second World War. He received the Perkin Medal for his contributions to industrial chemistry.