Kerosene and the birth of oil refining

In the 1840s and 1850s, lamps burned whale oil, expensive and in shortening supply. The Canadian physician and geologist Abraham Gesner distilled a clean-burning fuel from coal and bituminous shale, which he named kerosene. In Lviv, in the Austrian province of Galicia (modern Ukraine), the pharmacist Ignacy Lukasiewicz, working with Jan Zeh, distilled lamp oil from the crude oil seeping from the ground nearby. In July 1853, doctors in the Lviv hospital performed an emergency operation by the light of a kerosene lamp that Lukasiewicz had made, an early use of the new fuel.¹²

Distillation had been known since the Islamic chemists of the ninth century, but separating oil into fractions of different weight was new as an industry. Whale oil had lit homes and street lamps in the industrial age, but sperm whale numbers were falling and prices rose, and cities and factories needed light for the dark hours of their working days. Lukasiewicz built a refinery at Ulaszowice in 1856, and the Polish Carpathian oil field at Bobrka, drilled in 1854, was among the first commercial oil wells. Within a few years, American refiners were converting seep oil and coal oil to kerosene too.²

The new fuel was cheap enough for ordinary homes, and the demand for it drove the search for crude oil. In 1859 Edwin Drake drilled his well at Titusville, Pennsylvania, to supply the kerosene lamp market, and John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, founded in 1870, grew by refining oil into kerosene. Kerosene lamps were the main source of artificial light for decades before the electric bulb, and many rural homes used them into the twentieth century. Gasoline, a by-product, was long thrown away until the car engine created demand, and kerosene later became jet fuel.