Brain Over Brawn

Technical men, not brawny wildcatters, are the new glamor boys of the oil industry. This week sprawling Standard Oil Co. (Indiana) underlined this fact when it upped Chemist-Engineer Robert Erastus Wilson, 51, to its board chairmanship (vacant since 1929). Wilson knows better than anyone else in Standard how to crack the last salable product out of a gallon of crude oil. To make sure that Wilson will have enough crude to work on, Standard also upped Geologist Alonzo William Peake, a director, to the presidency, to succeed retiring President Edward Seubert. Eugene Holman, president of Standard Oil (N.J.), is also a geologist.

The first chemist ever to head Standard, plainspeaking, heavy-set Bob Wilson is the son of a college professor (College of Wooster, Ohio). He left an associate professorship at M.I.T. in 1922 to become assistant director of S.O.I.'s research department. In his research days he developed refining processes on which he holds 90 patents, including one on Indiana's widely advertised oil, Iso-Vis. Standard has cashed in on these and other processes Wilson had a hand in finding. Wilson has cashed in too. His salary of $60,000 a year, as president of Pan American Petroleum and Transport Co., Indiana subsidiary, would now be $100,000. As boss of the third biggest oil company in the U.S., Wilson takes a gloomy but realistic view of wartime U.S. oil policy. Said he: "A country that has only about 15% of the world's possible oil land and 30% of its known reserves cannot continue indefinitely to produce 65% of its oil."

But as a chemist he sees little to worry about. Said he: "What if we do use up all our petroleum? In five or ten years, with the technological advances that have been made and are in sight, we can make all the gasoline we want from coal, and sell it for only 5-c- more a gallon."

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