John Wesley Van Dyke was an American inventor and oil company executive.
Background
Van Dyke was born on December 27, 1849, on a farm near Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. He was the third of four sons and fourth of six children of William Randles and Elizabeth (Smith) Van Dyke.
His grandfather, William Van Dyke, had emigrated from the Netherlands about 1800 and settled on a semi-wilderness farm in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. His father devoted his energies to the family acreage and to the occupation of droving; he was killed in an early skirmish of the Civil War.
Education
John Wesley acquired a better-than-average education for his time, attending elementary schools in Mercersburg and Tuscarora Academy in Juniata County, Pennsylvania.
Career
Rather than study law, as his family had planned, in 1867, Van Dyke sought employment in the Venango County, Pennsylvania, oil fields. After a few months as a clerk in a store, he became an employee of an oil producer. Starting as a pumper, the young man moved successively from tool dresser to driller to drilling contractor to successful petroleum producer. In 1873, through an Oil Regions friend, he became a master mechanic (plant engineer) of the Brooklyn refinery of the Long Island Oil Company, an early member of the Standard Oil alliance.
From that date until 1911, Van Dyke labored within the great Standard Oil combination. In 1879, he was appointed a manager of the King's County Works of the Sone & Fleming Manufacturing Company in Brooklyn. Seven years later he went to Lima, Ohio, as general manager of the refinery of the Solar Refining Company.
Later a vice-president of Solar, in 1903 he took a demotion in the title to become manager of the Point Breeze refinery of the Atlantic Refining Company in Philadelphia. Two years later he was elected vice-president of Atlantic Refining. Van Dyke achieved his successes through a talent for refinery engineering and invention as well as the ability to lead groups of men.
Although lacking in advanced formal training, he possessed practical engineering ability which led him time after time to evolve patentable solutions to technological problems. When Atlantic Refining was separated from Standard Oil Company by court decree in 1911, Van Dyke was elected president of the now independent firm, a post he retained until 1927; he remained chairman of the board until his death. He also acted as director and officer of many affiliates of Atlantic Refining, not to mention several clubs, railroad companies, banks, and the American Petroleum Institute. Under Van Dyke's leadership, Atlantic Refining was transformed from a relatively weak corporation into one of the fully integrated major oil companies in the United States.
In 1911, the firm was heavily in debt, owned only three refineries, had a marketing organization only in Pennsylvania and Delaware, and possessed no organization for foreign sales. Imitating the pattern of predecessors and competitors in the industry, by 1927, Van Dyke had led Atlantic Refining into producing petroleum in Kentucky, Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, with transportation supplied by company-owned pipelines, terminals, and tankers.
While improving the quality of products and facilities for selling them at modern service stations, the company expanded its refineries and extended its domestic marketing territory north, south, and west. Simultaneously, through the creation of wholly or partially- owned affiliated companies, Atlantic Refining built marketing organizations in western Europe, Africa, South America, and Australia. Almost all expansion was achieved by plowing back earnings.
Van Dyke died in Philadelphia, of complications caused by age, and was buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery there.
Achievements
Van Dyke was president of the Atlantic Refining Company, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 1911 until 1927. After the break-up of Standard Oil Trust, Van Dyke led the debt-ridden Atlantic Refining Company into expanded markets and sales of more than $131 million.
Among his patented ideas, worked out either alone or with others, were mechanical improvements in the process devised by Herman Frasch for eliminating sulfur from Lima-Indiana sour crude, a method for applying hydrochloric acid under pressure in drill holes to facilitate the flow of petroleum from oil-bearing rock, the railroad tank car, and a pipeline end protector. Probably, his most forward-looking invention was the "tower" still, which embodied the principle of selective condensation of petroleum fractions rather than that of selective distillation previously used in American refineries.
Since the "tower" still enabled refiners to improve the separation of fractions, to eliminate some processes in refining, and to reduce costs, the device was widely adopted by Standard Oil firms after 1903, gave the combination's refiners the advantage of a technological innovation, and constituted an outstanding step in the evolution of modern refining technology.
Personality
After Van Dyke's death, newspapers reported that he had bequeathed some $1, 500, 000 to subsidize the education of deserving students, preferably the children of Atlantic Refining employees who had been with the company ten years or more.
Connections
On October 14, 1889, Van Dyke married Emma L. Grimes of Mayville, N. Y. They had no children.
