Solomon Robert Dresser (February 1, 1842 – January 21, 1911) was an inventor and a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania.

The problem he first tackled was preventing dirty surface groundwater from contaminating oil pumped from wells, which was accomplished by so-called "packers" sealing the gap between the well and the tube for pumping the oil.

By the late 1870s, he developed a new type of packer utilizing a tube-like rubber seal squeezed during operation, and in 1880 patented his invention[1] and founded S.R.

[2] Later in the 1880s, he started developing pipeline connectors, and after several patents in 1886-1889 arrived to a leakproof flexible design featuring, just like his packer, a squeezable tube-like rubber seal.

This Dresser joint or Dresser coupling for the first time enabled long-range transmission of natural gas,[3] displaced all the other alternatives on the market and became a de facto standard in the industry by late 1890s,[4] continuing at least into 1920s.