Oil before the oil industry
People used petroleum long before refineries. Natural seeps provided bitumen for waterproofing and mortar in the ancient Near East, and oil from shallow pits was burned or applied as medicine in various places. These were small-scale uses. What changed in the mid-1800s was the arrival of a market large enough to justify drilling and processing crude oil in bulk.
The problem of lighting
In the early 1800s, lighting at home was expensive for most people. Candles made from tallow or beeswax, vegetable oils in lamps and whale oil were all in use, and whale oil became costly as it grew scarce. Coal gas lighting existed in cities but required a pipe network. There was room for a clean-burning liquid fuel that was cheap.
Kerosene from coal and shale first
The first successful kerosene came not from crude oil but from coal and similar rocks. James Young in Scotland produced a paraffin oil by distilling cannel coal and shale in the early 1850s, and patented the process. In Canada, physician and geologist Abraham Gesner developed a lamp fuel from coal-like material and called it kerosene, patenting a version in the United States in 1854. He is often credited with the name, which was formed from Greek roots for wax and oil.
In Central Europe, Ignacy Łukasiewicz, a Polish pharmacist, and his colleagues distilled lamp oil from oil seeps around Lviv in 1853, and a street lamp and a hospital lamp are reported to have been lit with it. He later helped establish oil wells and a refinery in Galicia. Several people reached similar results at about the same time, so no single claim to the first kerosene is secure; the matter is often presented in a simplified way.
The Pennsylvania wells
In 1859, Edwin Drake drilled a well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, and struck oil at a modest depth. The event is often called the start of the American oil industry. Drake was not the first to drill for oil, since wells had been dug elsewhere, for example in Baku and in Canada. It is better described as the point at which drilled wells began to supply oil reliably for sale. Oil prices swung wildly, and early producers shipped barrels by wagon and river, with many going bankrupt.
How crude oil is separated
Crude oil is a mixture of many hydrocarbons, and refining largely separates them by boiling point. In the early stills, oil was heated in a closed iron vessel, and the vapors were cooled and collected in sequence. The lightest fractions, now including gasoline, boiled off first, followed by the middle fraction used for kerosene, then heavier oils, and finally tar and residue.
Early refiners treated the kerosene fraction with acid and alkali to improve its smell and reduce smoke, then washed it. If the light, volatile fraction was not removed well, the lamp fuel could ignite easily, and lamp accidents and fires became a safety issue. Some places later set minimum flash-point standards for lamp oil, which is an early example of product regulation in this industry.
Why the lamps spread
Kerosene lamps spread widely in the 1860s and later for practical reasons:
- The fuel burned with a bright, steady flame in a lamp with a wick and a glass chimney.
- It was cheaper than whale oil and could be shipped in barrels and sold in towns and rural stores.
- Lamps themselves were simple, so the technology reached farms and cities without wiring or pipes.
- Producers could expand supply as new wells came in.
Whale oil demand fell as kerosene arrived, though other factors also affected whaling, so it is too simple to say that petroleum alone saved the whales. Kerosene lighting remained common in many homes until electric lighting and incandescent bulbs took over in cities in the early 1900s, and it continued in places without electricity afterward. Kerosene also became a heating and cooking fuel.
Business and consolidation
Refining was capital-intensive, and companies that controlled it gained power over producers. John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, founded in 1870, built a large share of American refining through acquisitions, favorable freight rates and efficient operation. Its growth led to antitrust action, and a court ordered its breakup in 1911. This is a broad outline, and the details are debated by historians.
Gasoline moves from waste to main product
For decades, gasoline was an awkward byproduct, sometimes discarded or used as a solvent. The growing demand of the gasoline engine and, later, motor cars changed that. Refiners then needed more gasoline per barrel than simple distillation could provide. Thermal cracking, in which heavier fractions are broken into lighter ones under heat and pressure, was introduced commercially in the 1910s, with William Burton’s process at Standard Oil of Indiana often cited from 1913. Later catalytic cracking improved yields further.
Refineries also grew into chemical suppliers. Their output now provides feedstock for plastics, solvents and synthetic fibers, as described in the history of industrial chemistry. The same fuel that began as a way to light a room became a basis of transport, and later the source of aircraft engines’ fuel.