Robert Abplanalp

Robert Henry Abplanalp, (KHS) (April 4, 1922 – August 30, 2003) was an American inventor and engineer who invented the modern form of the aerosol spray valve, the founder of Precision Valve Corporation, a Republican political activist, and a close confidant of Richard Nixon.

After serving in World War II he worked in his machine shop where he invented a practical aerosol valve that could be mass-produced inexpensively.

[1] In 1974 University of California at Irvine chemist Frank Sherwood Rowland suggested that long-lived organic halogen compounds, such as the CFCs then widely used to pressurize spray cans, would reach the stratosphere where they would be dissociated by UV light, releasing chlorine atoms.

[2] At the time of Abplanalp's death in Bronxville, New York from lung cancer on August 30, 2003, age 81, he held more than 300 aerosol-related patents.

One of the central national issues in the Watergate scandal was a set of allegations that President Richard M. Nixon's administration had taken official action in response to money given to him or to his political organizations.