A kerosene lamp once lit an emergency operation in Lviv
On the night of 31 July 1853, surgeons in Lviv faced an urgent operation that candlelight could not support. They sent for Ignacy Lukasiewicz, a local pharmacist tinkering with a new lamp fuel. It burned so brightly and cleanly that the hospital ordered several lamps and a large stock of oil, and he soon quit pharmacy.
Kerosene, called paraffin in Britain, Norway and parts of Africa, is a clear, thin hydrocarbon liquid distilled from petroleum at roughly 150 to 275 degrees Celsius. Its molecules mostly carry between 9 and 16 carbon atoms, and it releases about as much heat per kilogram as diesel. Today it powers jet engines, and in a highly refined grade called RP-1, some rockets, while in many homes it still fuels cooking and lighting. Worldwide use ran to about 5.5 million barrels a day in 2023.
Distilling it is old knowledge. In the ninth century the Persian physician Razi described two ways of making a clear burning oil he called white naphtha, using an alembic. The industrial story, though, is a tangle of rivals. Canadian geologist Abraham Gesner said he demonstrated a lamp fuel distilled from coal in 1846 on Prince Edward Island and coined the word kerosene from Greek roots meaning wax and oil. Scottish chemist James Young, meanwhile, extracted what he named paraffine oil from boghead coal, patented it in 1850 and opened the world's first truly commercial oil-works at Bathgate in 1851.
Young beat Gesner to an American patent by two years, and courts made other producers pay him royalties, although Gesner's purer product smelled better. Gesner trademarked Kerosene in 1854. In Pennsylvania, Samuel Kier had been dumping petroleum that fouled his salt wells into a canal before distilling it and selling it to miners as Carbon Oil.
What undid the patents was abundance. Edwin Drake's well in 1859 set off a drilling rush, and refiners could make lamp oil straight from crude without paying anyone. By the 1860s American lighting oil came entirely from petroleum, and the brand name slid into a generic word. Before all this, the best indoor lamp fuel had come from sperm whales. The World Health Organization now counts kerosene as a polluting fuel because its smoke carries heavy particulate matter.
Source: Kerosene
