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Son of Ross & Darlie Louise Forward.
License to practice medicine, 1896
Aug 21, 1902
Dr Chauncey B Forward, president of the Forward Reduction Company, filed a petition in bankruptcy in the US District Court. His schedule shows that he owes $478,578 and has assets worth $4,225, of which $916 is exempt. Dr Forwards creditors are scattered all of the US. Mr Forward went into bankruptcy because of the financial embarrassment of the Forward Reduction Company. The company will follow him into the bankruptcy court. The holdings of the company are located in Orange and Jefferson Counties, Texas and across the state line...
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Son of Ross & Darlie Louise Forward.
License to practice medicine, 1896
Aug 21, 1902
Dr Chauncey B Forward, president of the Forward Reduction Company, filed a petition in bankruptcy in the US District Court. His schedule shows that he owes $478,578 and has assets worth $4,225, of which $916 is exempt. Dr Forwards creditors are scattered all of the US. Mr Forward went into bankruptcy because of the financial embarrassment of the Forward Reduction Company. The company will follow him into the bankruptcy court. The holdings of the company are located in Orange and Jefferson Counties, Texas and across the state line in Louisiana. The represent lands owned in fee simple and held under long term leases. The company was engaged in the refining of oil and similar products under a secret process of Dr Forwards discovery.
1908 -- Dr Chauncey Forward of Urbana underwent an operation for appendicitis Tuesday in a Cleveland hospital.
Sept, 1910 - Took the Boy Scouts from Urbana on a camping trip. Daughter Frances went along and acted as mascot.
Oct, 1911 - Assistant Teacher of the Truth Seekers Class of the First ME Church, Urbana. Interesting and instructive sessions are held in which each member takes a part under the direction of their teacher.
May 23, 1914 -- Dr CB Forward of Scioto Street has just returned from New York where he has been in cousultation with shome of the high men in the oil business, both the Standard Oil and independant companies. Dr Forward has patented process for refining the crude product which he discovered and has brought to a state of perfection that promises to revolutionize the oil industry. While these experts are not prone to take anything for granted and are inclined to belittle outside propositions, the doctor feels that he has more than favorably impressed them all. The Standard Oil people want him to hold off from negotiations with any other company. The head chemist of the largest companies outside the Standard group admitted the proposition looked most feasible and the department was so impressed with the idea that he intimated he would recommend the expenditure of 5 or 6 thousand dollars necessary to demonstrate the idea for the company. Dr Forward has worked for years to perfect this idea. He predicts within a few years the entire oil producing world will have adopted his method as he has patents covering all the oil producing countries. He proposes to lease it on the royalty basis and will not give the exclusive us to any one company or sell it outright. The process will save two thirds the time and fuel now necessary to do the work. The process will not do the work any better than the present method as far as securing the oils of different gravity but instead of making the base of the oil into coke worth a few dollars of fuel, makes it into asphalt worth four or five times that of coke and this is a big saving also.
Oct 27, 1916
The Standard Oil Company finished its severe test of Dr CB Forwards new oil refining process Thursday and departed for Philadelphia. As would be expected they refused to make any comment after finishing the test except to tell Dr Forward the plant was the most complete they had ever worked with. Not a hitch of any kind occurred during the entire test which lasted Monday until Thursday. One of the representatives spent nearly 2 weeks at the plant before the test was started in acquainting himself with its operations. A large number of oil companies have made requests to test the process and will likely be given their turn. On account of the large number of applications, Dr Forward is unable to use his plant for commercial purposes. For this reason he is preparing to increase its capacity to 500 barrels per day. He has been promised a delivery of stills for Jan 1 and after that date will be able to produce gasoline for commercial purposes.
April 20, 1933 -- .....The experimental installation of the Forward vapor phase cracking process at Urbana consists of a flash boiler delivering steam at 300 pounds pressure and temperature of 1200F. The horizontal pipe at the bottom is for feeding waste gases to the boiler. At the left are the coils, surrounded by superheated steam and the carbon precipitating chamber, where a small percentage of free carbon similar to carbon black is precipitated. The oil vapors go from the top of the chamber to the condenser or the dephlegmator. Persons who visit the plant in operation are astonished to see pipes heated red hot by steam.
August 24, 1933 -- Forward Process Company has been formed to put on the market commercially the new Forward process, a system by which a higher amount of superior grade gasoline may be obtained from the crude oils. The process itself involves vapor phase cracking in which the crude oil passes through coils of pipe, surrounded by super heated steam. There are a series of these steam heated coils, each one increasing in temperature until the desired amount of "cracking" is accomplished. Dr Forward has designed and constructed 16 different boilers to provide steam at 1200 degrees, each one "a little larger and a little more efficient than the one before". The old plant of the Oil Refining and Development Company, located just south of Miami St by the Erie Railroad tracks, will be retained for experimentation. Dr Forward had a process similar to the present one, producing high compression gasoline in 1922. Just as he was preparing to market the product, his plant burned to the ground and forced him to build a new outfit and resume his experimenting. The new product is a gasoline with more power and anti-knock quality than any on the market. The method used has baffled some of the best engineers in the country who couldn't understand how the process could be completed without an enormous waste in coke residue. His formula was placed before leading engineers of the largest oil companies in the world before it was finally accepted as practical by the Doherty representatives. Several engineers scoffed and turned him aside without seeking a demonstration of the process. Dr Forward has been interested in oil and oil refining for 38 years. He was the pioneer oil prospector in Texas when he went there in 1898 engaging in wildcat drilling.
After losing everything he became interested in street railway equipment work. successful at this, he sold out a few years later when he became paralyzed from the hips down as the result of a nervous disorder. He then came to Urbana where he regained his health. Be reason of the increasing demand for gasoline on account of the growing automobile industry, he soon became interested again in oil refining and began experimenting in a small shop in the southeastern end of town.
Sept 28, 1933
Dr Chauncey B Forward, Urbana's most colorful character insofar as industrial and civic promotions of the past 20 years are concerned, is dead. He passed away quietly at his home, Scioto St, at 1am Thursday from a sudden heart attack. He had been resting for 2 seeks from the weariness engendered by a recent business trip to the east.
The 72 years of his life were full of adventures in the realms of industry and finance. Fortunes passed through his hands. He was in turn a successful Ohio physician, the head of a gigantic oil prospecting project in southwest Texas, a student of oil refining methods in Russia, manufactuaer of street railway equipment in Cleveland and an experimentor and inventor of a vapor phase cracking process for refining gasoline with an experimental plant in Urbana.
Dr Forward came to this city near the age of 50, at a time in life when most men are beginning to contemplate the close of their careers. He had seen much of life. Three times he had occupied positions of prominence. He had controlled wealth and he had seen his possessions and his hopes swept away in business disasters. He was a cripple as a result of a nervous ailment but his mental endowments were remarkable. He had faith persistence and tenacity in unusual degree although his aggressiveness was never apparent at the moment and his manner was ever mild. As a result of these characteristics he was able to accomplish the seemingly impossible.
In the face of terrific handicaps and discouragements he began life in Urbana with a two fold purpose, the rehabilitation of his health and of his fortune. In the 20 odd years that followed he worked incessantly. He lived to discard his crutches. He lived to invent a process of refining gasoline that is now sponsored by a company of gigantic rise. He earned the gratitude and respect of the community by his church and civic work. Busy with experimentation and travel, faced with Herculean tasks in raising bit by bit a million dollars that was subsequently spent in experimental work, Dr Forward nevertheless found time to teach Class 15 of the Methodist Church for many years, to be president of the Kiwanis Club, to sponsor Chautauquas in Urbana and to establish a Community Center where boys and young men could enjoy the benefits of game rooms and gymnasium.
He was born in Somerset, PA, July 2, 1861, the son of Mr and Mrs Chauncey B Forward. The family moved to Cincinnati where Dr Forward received his medical education. His early manhood was spent as a physician in Cleveland. He married there and 2 sons - Chauncey B and Louis E were born. While they were small children their mother died and the 2 boys came to Urbana to make their home with their uncle and aunt, Mr and Mrs Samuel Warnock. In 1898 Dr Forward went to Texas and after a few years returned to Cleveland where he lived until coming to Urbana. About 27 years ago he was united in marriage to Dr Laura B Wilson, only daughter of BR Wilson of Scioto St. To this union a daughter was born, who is Mrs Frances C Hutton of Lynchburg, VA. Surviving are his wife, 2 sons and daughter and 2 grandsons.
Above and apart from the statistical facts of Dr Forwards life is the interest in may episodes in his remarkable career. Twelve hundred stockholders put their faith and their money, aggregating $1,000,000 in the Forward Oil Refining and Development Company in the years that Dr Forward experimented here with his vaporphase cracking process. He started work in a little shed, tinkering with oil and chemists equipment and supplies. Gradually he pressed forward, working 16 and 18 hours a day. Ideas developed as his health improved. He raised the money and began experimenting with larger equipment. In his experimental factory, Dr Forward passed crude oil through coils of pipe, surrounded by steam superheated to 1,200 degrees - a temperature so high that pipes near the boilers carrying it glowed red hot. Professors and practical oil men said that it couldn't be done without oil pipes filling with coke, but test runs here subsequently proved that they were wrong. 16 special boilers for producing superheated steam were build by Dr Forward in the course of his years by what he referred to as the "cutting, trying and fitting" method. The first plant built in 1918 was destroyed by fire four years later. It was rebuilt almost on surmountable financial difficulties. Dr Forward, accustomed at various times in his early life to handling large sums of money, always was able to finance his experimentations. The background for his ability in promoting capital dated back to his career in Texas. He leased several hundred thousand acres of land there in 1898. He organized and employed a dozen drilling outfits engaged in prospecting. He was a pioneer. He bored wells where he thought there would be oil - not near places where others already had a struck it rich. And he struck oil. Then came a difficulty. Thre was no refinery close enough to make profitable use of the oil that was flowing so freely. Dr Forward then began a study of refining methods. In search of information he went to Europe and spent 4 months, much of the time in the oil fields of Russia studying production and refinery methods. While he was away the company which he had headed and to which he had entrusted his fortune failed. He lost everything, including his home in Cleveland. Determined, as he said in a recent interview, "never to see a bottle of oil again" he returned to Cleveland. He became interested in street railway equipment manufacturing there.
Many of Dr Forwards financial experiences were harrowing to him and to his friends. He was so intent on his work and so inspired with faith that it would succeed, that he often deprived himself of necessities in order to spend weeks in New York, negotiating with prospective oil company purchasers of his numerous patents. Many engineers and production men representing the largest oil companies of the world visited Urbana at various times to conduct test runs at Dr Forwards experimental plant. Analysis of the gasoline produced always showed it to be of superior quality. It was but a few months ago that the engineers of the Doherty Research Company, affliated with the Cities Service Corporation and the Henry L Doherty Company, reported favorably on the possibility of practical use of Dr Forwards process. As a result the Forward Process Company was formed to exploit the methods developed by Dr Forward, then owned by the Forward Oil Refining and Development Company. New capital was introduced to carry on the work and stockholders in Dr Forwards company exchanged their stock certificates for the securities of the new concern. Dr Forward was made a vice president and the old company received financial aid to pay its remaining debts.
Two weeks ago Dr Forward returned from New York complaining of great weariness. He expressed the desire to rest and stay away from activities for a while. He was not bedfast, but remained quietly at home. His death was unexpected although his close friends knew that he often suffered from sudden illness.
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