Almer McDuffie McAfee (1886-1972), an American chemist who developed the petroleum industry's first commercially viable catalytic cracking process, a method that ultimately would more than double gasoline yield from crude oil relative to then-standard distillation methods (1923). The McAfee cracking process required anhydrous aluminum chloride, a catalyst that was prohibitively expensive. McAfee solved this problem by developing a way to synthesize the catalytic reagent at a low cost on an industrial scale, greatly increasing the viability and efficiency of the process.