In 1922 Eugene Houdry was the fils in Houdry & Fils, Parisian steelmakers. His hobby was auto racing. One day a racing driver excitedly showed him a bottle of gasoline which he said a pharmacist in Nice had derived from lignite ("brown coal"). France, which has lignite but little petroleum, was then in the throes of an oil-shortage scare, and 29-year-old Eugene Houdry caught the driver's excitement.
The end product of that excitement, fully described for the first time this week in FORTUNE, is a new process for deriving gasoline from crude oil rather than from lignite. It will not...
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