William Merriam Burton

William Merriam Burton was an American chemist and oil industry executive, born November 17, 1865 in Cleveland, Ohio and died December 29, 1954 in Miami, Florida, who invented the first commercially successful thermal cracking process for refining petroleum. After earning a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1889, he spent his career at Standard Oil, working at its refinery in Whiting, Indiana, where his research led to the process patented in January 1913 as U.S. Patent 1,049,667: heating crude oil under pressure to break, or crack, its heavier hydrocarbon molecules into lighter ones, roughly doubling the amount of gasoline that could be extracted from a barrel of crude at a time when the automobile was rapidly driving up demand for it. The Burton process was adopted across the American refining industry and earned him the Willard Gibbs Award in 1918 and the Perkin Medal in 1922; he went on to serve as president of Standard Oil from 1918 to 1927.