Melvin De Groote (February 27, 1895 – February 3, 1963)
was an American chemist and
prolific inventor. He was listed on 925 U.S utility patents, making him the all-time seventeenth most
prolific inventor and tenth among US inventors as of December 19, 2017. ''
Time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, t ...
'' magazine's millennium issue recognized him as second to
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These invent ...
in this regard.
Time (magazine)
/ref> The article omitted non-US citizens.
De Groote invented and patented many of the de-emulsifying agent
An emulsion is a mixture of two or more liquids that are normally immiscible (unmixable or unblendable) owing to liquid-liquid phase separation. Emulsions are part of a more general class of two-phase systems of matter called colloids. Although ...
s that separate crude oil from salt, sulfur, and water. Without de-emulsification, most of the oil pumped in the US for the last century would have been too corrosive for pipelines or tankers and would have been discarded.
Petrolite
Petrolite Corporation was an American manufacturer of chemicals. Founded in 1930 from the merger of the Tret-O-lite Company with the Petroleum Rectifying Company of California (PETRECO), it was subsequently merged into Baker Hughes Incorporated ...
was De Groote's employer of 36 years. De Groote was recruited to the firm from the Mellon Institute
The Mellon Institute of Industrial Research is a former research institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States, which is now part of Carnegie Mellon University. It was founded in 1913 by Andrew Mellon and Richard B. Mellon as part of the U ...
in 1924 upon the death of the company's founder, William S. Barnickel
William is a masculine given name of Norman French origin.Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 276. It became very popular in the English language after the Norman conques ...
.
Of Dutch-Jewish ancestry, De Groote was born in Wheeling, West Virginia
Wheeling is a city in the U.S. state of West Virginia. Located almost entirely in Ohio County, of which it is the county seat, it lies along the Ohio River in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and also contains a tiny portion extendin ...
on February 27, 1895, to Luis De Groote and Jennie De Groote (née Fuld). He attended the Sistersville, West Virginia
Sistersville is a city in Tyler County, West Virginia, United States, along the Ohio River. The population was 1,413 at the 2020 census. The Sistersville Ferry crosses the Ohio River to the unincorporated community of Fly in Monroe County, O ...
High School.Ohio State University
The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best pu ...
in 1915 with a degree in chemical engineering
Chemical engineering is an engineering field which deals with the study of operation and design of chemical plants as well as methods of improving production. Chemical engineers develop economical commercial processes to convert raw materials in ...
. He took a second chemical engineering degree in 1942, also from Ohio State, and was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Science
Doctor of Science ( la, links=no, Scientiae Doctor), usually abbreviated Sc.D., D.Sc., S.D., or D.S., is an academic research degree awarded in a number of countries throughout the world. In some countries, "Doctor of Science" is the degree used f ...
in 1955. He was awarded the Lamme Medal in 1950 by the College of Engineering for "meritorious achievement in engineering and the chemical arts". He was also a member of Tau Beta Pi
The Tau Beta Pi Association (commonly Tau Beta Pi, , or TBP) is the oldest engineering honor society and the second oldest collegiate honor society in the United States. It honors engineering students in American universities who have shown a ...
, an engineering society.
De Groote, in his work in flavorings at the Mellon Institute, was rumored to have been hired by Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola, or Coke, is a carbonated soft drink manufactured by the Coca-Cola Company. Originally marketed as a temperance drink and intended as a patent medicine, it was invented in the late 19th century by John Stith Pemberton in Atla ...
to re-formulate its syrups to eliminate the alcoholic ingredients that were outlawed during prohibition
Prohibition is the act or practice of forbidding something by law; more particularly the term refers to the banning of the manufacture, storage (whether in barrels or in bottles), transportation, sale, possession, and consumption of alcoholic ...
(the company does not acknowledge any changes to its recipes).
De Groote died on February 3, 1963, in St. Louis
St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...
, Missouri
Missouri is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. Ranking List of U.S. states and territories by area, 21st in land area, it is bordered by eight states (tied for the most with Tennessee ...
, at the age of 67.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:De Groote, Melvin
1895 births
1963 deaths
Death in Missouri
People from Sistersville, West Virginia
People from Wheeling, West Virginia
20th-century American inventors