Today in the Year 1942: A Breakthrough in the Oil World, Thanks to American Ingenuity

On this day in 1942, while the nation was embroiled in the Second World War, a quiet revolution in oil and gas production began. At the time the country was desperate for fuel - for ships, tanks, airplanes, trucks, and everything that the War Department was moving around the globe.

Thanks to a man named Charles "Wes" Tyson and three of his colleagues, working for the Exxon corporation, yields of oil and gas were about to take off, thanks to their new process, fluid catalytic fracking, with the first such operation starting up on May 25th, 1942.

Charles "Wes" Tyson and his three co-inventors at Exxon Research & Engineering Co. (ER&E), called the Four Horsemen, were part of the team responsible for developing fluid catalytic cracking, the process that produces over half the world's gasoline. They developed the process in 1942, and the first commercial fluid cat cracking facility went on-line on May 25, 1942.
In the 1930s, ER&E was looking for a way to increase the yield of high-octane gasoline from crude oil. Researchers discovered that a finely powdered catalyst behaved like a fluid when mixed with oil in the form of vapor. During the cracking process, a catalyst will split hydrocarbon molecule chains into smaller pieces. These smaller, or cracked, molecules then go through a distillation process to retrieve the usable product. During the cracking process, the catalyst becomes covered with carbon; the carbon is then burned off and the catalyst can be re-used.

Tyson held U.S. Patent No. 2,451,804 for the process, along with his colleagues Eger V. Murphree, Homer Z. Martin, and Donald L. Campbell.

This wasn't the only patent Mr. Tyson held; by the time he was done, he had 50 patents to his name.

Tyson was born in Chicago, Illinois. In 1930, after receiving his bachelor's and master's degrees in chemical engineering from MIT, he joined ER&E. He served as director of the Petroleum Development Division before his appointment in 1961 as special assistant to the vice president of ER&E. At his retirement in 1962, Tyson held over 50 patents, mainly in the petroleum processing area.

In 1999, all four were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. And this invention was literally a world-changer.

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This is a cracking process, not to be confused with fracking, which is the pressured insertion of fluid into oil and gas-bearing strata. The process invented by these four was a cracking process, equally innovative, that allowed the production of a higher proportion of light distillates, like gasoline and aviation fuel. That was invaluable for a nation at war - and it invaluable in our nation today, where we all depend on a constant, affordable supply of fuels like gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.

Fracking, of course, refers to the process of breaking open oil and gas-bearing rock by the injection of pressurized liquid, allowing the oil and gas to be extracted from a larger area. That also ramped up production at a time when the nation sorely needed every barrel of oil we could get, but fracking, in 1942, wasn't an entirely new concept. As early as the 1860s, there were versions of fracking used to stimulate some shallow wells in hard rock, and even the ancient Romans practiced a primitive method of hydraulic fracking in mining for gold. They called it "Ruina montium," or "wrecking of mountains." Pliny the Elder described it:

Gold in our part of the world...is obtained in three ways: in the detritus of rivers, .... Another method is by sinking shafts; or it is sought for in the fallen débris of mountains.

But the process invented by Mr. Tyson, Mr. Murphree, Mr. Martin, and Mr. Campbell was equally revolutionary - and may have helped the Allies win World War 2.

That's an interesting side note, on Memorial Day weekend.

Oh, and also on this day, in 1977, there was some big hooraw about some movie releasing.

[Editor's Note: This article was edited for clarity post-publication.]

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