The world's first patent for a “Machine for Transcribing Letters” was granted in England by Queen Anne to Henry Mill (1683?-1771), a waterworks engineer with the New River Company. The patent (No. 395) described the invention as “an artificial machine or method for impressing or transcribing of letters, one after another, as in writing, whereby all writing whatsoever may be engrossed in paper or parchment so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print; that the said machine... may be of great use in settlements and public records, the impression being deeper and more lasting than any other writing, and not to be erased or counterfeited without manifest discovery.” There is no remaining record that he actually built the machine.

A U.S. patent for the thermal cracking of crude oil was issued to William Merriam Burton (No.1,049,667). A crude petroleum mixture of various hydrocarbons can be separated into several groups of constituents by physical means, commonly distillation. His thermal cracking process used high heat and high pressure to chemically break longer molecules of less volatile components into smaller molecules, more than doubling the yield of gasoline which was much needed to fuel the motor industry. In its first 15 years of use the process saved more than 1 billion barrels of crude oil. In 1937 the invention of catalytic cracking superseded the Burton process, but it remains in wide use.