Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Who was Jeff?

If I can ever unchain my self from the rheometer, I may have time to make a serious post. In the mean time, my thought over the weekend was this: why did Texaco create a line of chemicals all starting with the name Jeff? The most common ones that I am aware of is Jeffamine, a reactant for creating polyureas, and Jeffsol, alkylene carbonates. There may be others. So why Jeff? Was he the lead chemist? The head of marketing? The father or brother of the spouse of the head of marketing? (Crazier things have been done to please a spouse - see "Elton John plays 100th Anniversary of Harley-Davidson", "Babe Ruth traded to the Yankees" and "Gilligan's Island is cancelled".)

It won't do any good to call Texaco as the chemicals are now part of Huntsman.

7 comments:

Barney said...

I've been curious about this for awhile, too. I checked the USPTO website and found that the original trademarks were filed by the Jefferson Chemical Company--file linked as pdf here:
http://bit.ly/jeffamine

Matteo said...

Thank you Barney! It takes away a bit of the romance though...I really wished Jeff was a dude giving his name to the molecule discovered during the PhD, or something...

John said...

Thanks Barney. I never thought to take that approach.

Matteo, I agree with you on that this has spoiled the fun somewhat.

Barney said...

It does take all of the fun out of it. At least there are still all of the Josiphos, etc., ligands to wonder about.

And I came upon the USPTO site completely as the accidental outcome of a google search--I will have to remember it for future questions about industreial polymers.

Bruce Burton said...

The story of the "JEFF____"s:

Somewhat over 50 years ago, Texaco and American Cyanamid formed a joint venture company, with production plants located in Jefferson County, Texas (home to Port Neches, Port Arthur, Beaumont, etc.) and decided to name it Jefferson Chemical Co., after the name of the county. Some years later, Texaco bought out American Cyanamid's portion, kept the name Jefferson Chemical for a few years and then renamed the company Texaco Chemical. This lasted until acquisition by Huntsman in 1994. Huntsman has maintained and added "JEFF____" type brand names over that time. Among those are JEFFAMINE(R) amines, JEFFLINK(R) chain extender, JEFFSOL(R) carbonates, JEFFSPERSE(R) dispersants, JEFFADD(R) crosslinker, JEFFOL(R) polyols, JEFFTREAT(R) solvents, JEFFCOOL(R) industrial solvents, and JEFFCAT(R) catalysts. In the Performance Products division, where I work, our experimental products are often still named XTJ- or XTA- which originally stood for experimental Texaco JEFFAMINE(R) amine or experimental Texaco amine, respectively.

John said...

Bruce,

That is clearly the definitive word on the subject. Thank you.

These have to be some of the longest running chemical tradenames out there.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Barney,

ymmd. I was searching for that piece of information for about 9 weeks now :P
I must be especially incapable of digging out old stories like that ^^