Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 89.djvu/399

 The Story of Petroleum

��The author is an engineer connected with a great oil- refining company. His article, while it describes the general principles of oil-refining, is intended to explain how lubricat- ing-oil in particular is obtained. — Editor.

THERE is a vast dif- ference between pe- troleum as

it flows from the earth and its derivatives. An oil refiner>' is a res^ion of giant stills, filters, stor- age tanks, steam and power plants, coal bunkers and laboratories. Its working popula- tion is equal to that of many

��By C. W. Stnitford

���The Agitator Is a Bleaching Oil and

��Lead -Lined Steel Tower for for Removing Impurities

��towns. Immense workshops are required to manufacture the undreds of thousands of bar- rels, boxes and tins in which its many products are shipped.

Crude oils are not simple chemical compounds but consist of a physical mix- tureof different compounds of the element carbon and element hydrogen. Other elements such as sulphur, oxygen, nitro- gen and metallic salts, etc., arc present as im- purities. Each one of these many com- pounds has its own definite physical proper- ties, such as fixed boiling point, gravity

���Battery of Aerial Condenser for Automatically Condensing Different Distillates. Which Are Then Conducted Through the Water-Cooled Pipes to Their Respective "Running" Tanks

385

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