History

The gas known as isobutylene was originally removed from oil refinery streams, and in 1945, Walter H. Rupp and John W. Packie from Standard Oil New Jersey, which is now known as Exxon, discovered that isobutylene could be extracted with the use of sulfuric acid. Then in 1950, Rupp and Packie bettered the method of separating excess/unwanted chemicals such as 1-butene from the already extracted isobutylene. 

Later in 1979, the researchers Jerome R. Olechowski and Ralph Levine detected a new way for isobutylene to be created, and that was through the removal of water from tert-butyl alcohol; they used a p-toluenesulfonic acid in xylene solution to achieve this.

In 1937, the chemists Robert Thomas and William Sparks, who worked at Standard Oil New Jersey (now called Exxon), created butyl rubber. They originally experimented with a product similar to rubber known as Vistanex, which was mixed with a minor amount of butadiene and then was turned into butyl rubber. In World War II it was known as GR-I, meaning Government Rubber-Isobutylene, which was commonly used as a substitute for natural rubber as it was hard to obtain during the period of war.