William Merriam Burton

William Merriam Burton ( born November 17, 1865 in Cleveland, Ohio, † December 29, 1954 in Miami ) was an American chemist. He developed the first commercially successful method of thermal cracking in petroleum refining in the United States.

Burton studied chemistry at Western Reserve University with a bachelor's degree in 1886 and in 1889 received his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University. He worked for Standard Oil in 1890, first in its refinery in Whiting (Indiana) and 1918 until his retirement in 1927 as president.

His cracking process ( Burton method ) divided the long-chain hydrocarbons in crude oil under high pressure and temperature into shorter chains, was patented in 1913 and doubled the yield of gasoline from crude oil, in time to avoid bottlenecks in the First World War. Even before that, however, a cracking process in Russia in 1891 was designed by Vladimir Shukhov.

In 1918 he received the Willard Gibbs Medal.

Source

• Article in Encyclopedia Britannica ( Online)

• Chemists ( 20th century)
• Born 1865
• Died in 1954
• Americans
• Man