SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



In despair the refiners turned to the chemists for help. 

 John D. Rockefeller was one of the first petroleum men 

 to suspect that there might be a good deal of chemistry 

 involved in this business. He installed a real research 

 department and among the chemists he hired was a 

 strapping young Clevelander with a Ph.D. from Johns 

 Hopkins, William M. Burton. 



Burton worked out a practical plant operation of 

 breaking or "cracking" the higher carbon-hydrogen 

 combinations down to the lower gasoline range. This 

 cracking process just about doubled the output of gaso- 

 line from a given crude oil. It also demonstrated that 

 chemistry is a bread-and-butter proposition in the pe- 

 troleum business, and soon cracking by heat and pres- 

 sure graduated to chemical processing. 



Cracking induced by means of catalysts, those mys- 

 terious substances which hep up chemical reactions but 

 themselves remain inviolate, was next found to give 

 greater and better quality yields of petroleum products. 

 It produced a gasoline of higher octane value and more 

 susceptible to further improvement by tetraethyl lead. 

 Our powerful war weapon, aviation gasoline, therefore, 

 is a product of "cat-cracking," which is the petroleum 

 man's slang for the catalytic process of cracking crude 

 oil, first developed by Houdry. 



But this vital new process, perfected shortly before 

 the Nazis marched into Poland, has a serious operating 

 drawback. The pellets of catalyst through which the 



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