![]() His analysis determined that petroleum could be distilled for use in lighting. Booth had established in 1836 the first commercial chemical laboratory in the United States. ![]() He sent a sample to Professor James Curtis Booth of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, later president of the American Chemical Society. Kier’s salt wells produced more petroleum than he could sell, so he began looking for other uses for it. jars for 50 cents) cured burns, ulcers, cholera, asthma, indigestion, rheumatism, and blindness. Chemical analysis proved the two oils identical, and in 1852 Kier started marketing the oil from his wells as “Kier’s Petroleum, or Rock Oil.” Kier claimed his “medicine” (sold in 8 oz. Kier thought the oil contaminating his wells was similar to the “American Medicinal Oil” his wife took for a serious illness. At Tarentum, Pennsylvania, twenty miles north of Pittsburgh, Samuel Kier and his father owned salt wells which produced an annoying quantity of oil along with the desired brine. Seeping petroleum plagued salt well operators as it frequently came to the surface with salt brine. Others tried using petroleum - originally marketed as a medicine - as an illuminant. Samuel Kier Experiments with Pennsylvania Oil Gesner called it “keroselain” from the Greek word for ”wax” and “oil,” which soon became kerosene. Abraham Gesner, a Canadian geologist, made the first successful coal oil in North America, using a bituminous mineral found in New Brunswick. In the 1840s, scientists in Britain began producing an illuminant from the distillation of coal. This demand fueled the search for new sources of light. But demand intensified-and prices skyrocketed-with the development of mechanized transportation and industrialization. It also burned, but was unappealing as a lamp oil due to its unpleasant odor and smoke.Ĭandles and whale oil provided most of the artificial light in the decades before the Civil War. Europeans called the dark, gooey substance Seneca Oil and found it effective for treating sprains and rheumatism. This is true in northwestern Pennsylvania, where the Seneca tribe, part of the Iroquois nation, collected seep oil for hundreds of years, using it as a salve, insect repellent, and tonic. Later, knowledge of oil and its uses declined the Romans, for example, regarded petroleum as a curiosity only.īut the knowledge never fully disappeared since oil seeps to the surface in many parts of the world. Oil was used more than five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia bitumen was mined by the Sumerians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, who used it in architecture, building roads, caulking ships, and medicines. While the drilling of oil - which marks the start of the modern petroleum industry - dates only to the middle of the 19 th century, the knowledge of oil is very old. ![]() Landmark Designation and Acknowledgments.Development of the Pennsylvania Oil Industry.Colonel Edwin Drake and the First Oil Well.The Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company is Founded.Samuel Kier Experiments with Pennsylvania Oil.In the middle of the 19 th century two developments occurred that guaranteed Pennsylvania’s dominance: The construction, in Pittsburgh, of the first still to refine crude oil into kerosene for use in lighting, and the drilling of the first oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Long before Texas gushers and offshore drilling, and a century before oil wells dotted Arabian sands and rose out of Venezuelan waters, the center of petroleum production was western Pennsylvania. Steel Tower in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and August 27, 2009, at the Drake Well Museum in Titusville, Pennsylvania, during the 150 th anniversary of the discovery of oil by Edwin Drake.
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