James Mason Crafts (March 8, 1839 – 20 June 1917) was an American chemist, most famous for developing the Friedel-Crafts alkylation and acylation reactions with Charles Friedel in 1876.

James Crafts was born in Boston, Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard University in 1858. Although he never received his Ph.D., he studied chemistry in Germany for three years (1860 as Robert Bunsen's assistant in Heidelberg), then in Paris until he returned to the United States in 1865. In 1868, he was appointed as the first professor of chemistry at the newly founded Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The cold winters of Ithaca prompted him to move to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he served as president from 1897 to 1900.

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American chemists | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | Massachusetts Institute of Technology presidents | 1839 births | 1917 deaths | Cornell University faculty | James Mason Crafts | ジェームス・クラフツ