Kerosene

By the 1840s, the world faced a lighting crisis. Whale oil—the premium illuminant for over a century—was becoming scarce and expensive. Sperm whale populations had collapsed under relentless hunting; the price of sperm oil had tripled since 1820. The industrial revolution demanded more light for longer hours, but the biological supply chain was failing. Into this gap stepped kerosene, a chemical solution to an ecological problem.

Abraham Gesner, a Canadian geologist and physician, gave the first public demonstration of his new illuminating oil on August 11, 1846, in Prince Edward Island. He called it 'kerosene' from the Greek keros (wax). Gesner had been distilling coal and bitumen, applying the fractional distillation techniques developed for coal gas production to extract a light, clean-burning liquid fraction.

Gesner wasn't alone in this pursuit. James Young in Scotland was simultaneously developing 'paraffin oil' from coal in 1850. Samuel Kier in Pittsburgh was refining petroleum from oil seeps near salt wells and marketing 'Carbon Oil' as lamp fuel. The convergent development reflected the common underlying pressure: whale oil's scarcity created enormous economic incentive for alternatives.

What made kerosene revolutionary was its burning characteristics. Unlike whale oil, which required constant wick trimming and produced significant soot, kerosene burned cleanly and brightly with minimal maintenance. Unlike coal gas, it didn't require expensive distribution infrastructure—it could be bottled and sold anywhere. Unlike camphene (a turpentine-alcohol mixture widely used), it wasn't explosively volatile.

The adjacent possible had accumulated its components: distillation technology from the coal gas industry, understanding of hydrocarbon fractions from early petroleum experiments, and the lamp designs developed for various oils. Gesner's kerosene was initially derived from coal and bitumen, but the process worked equally well—better, in fact—on petroleum. This connection would prove transformative.

When Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859, he was drilling for kerosene feedstock. The 'rock oil' that had seeped from Appalachian ground for millennia suddenly had commercial value as a kerosene source. The petroleum industry began not as a transportation fuel enterprise but as a lighting fuel enterprise. Gasoline, the fraction too volatile for safe lamp use, was initially discarded as dangerous waste.

John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil built its empire on kerosene. The company's breakthrough wasn't extraction but refining—producing consistent, high-quality kerosene at industrial scale. By the 1870s, kerosene lit homes from Ohio farmhouses to Chinese villages. Standard Oil's five-gallon tins became ubiquitous in Asia and Africa, often repurposed after the kerosene was consumed.

The ecological irony is striking. Kerosene's commercial success likely saved the sperm whale from extinction. The species that had lit civilized homes for a century received an unexpected reprieve as petroleum displaced its oil. One extractive industry gave way to another, but the biological resource was granted time to recover.

Kerosene's dominance lasted barely fifty years. By 1910, electric lighting was displacing oil lamps in developed nations. But by then, another petroleum fraction—gasoline—had found its application in internal combustion engines. The infrastructure Rockefeller built for kerosene distribution became the foundation for automotive fuel distribution. Path dependence ensured petroleum's centrality to the twentieth century, long after its original lighting application had faded.