Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume IX.djvu/832

 812 KEROSENE larly, were already engaged in the extraction of the oils from bituminous substances, a patent for which had been granted in 1824 to the MM. Chervau. In 1832 Blum and Moneuse patented the application of these oils to illuminating purposes. The latter had a factory near Autun in the department of Saone-et-Loire for treat- ing the bituminous shales of that district ; the chemist Laurent was at this time engaged in conducting the operations, and a year or two afterward was succeeded by Selligue. The papers published by these chemists, and es- pecially the specifications of the patents taken out by the latter from 1834 to 1845, published in the Brevets d'invention, present full details of the operations, which they had already brought to such a state of perfection that the subsequent improvements introduced consisted merely in comparatively unimportant modifi- cations of the apparatus employed. Up to the year 1861 no treatise upon the subject had ap- peared at all comparable to that in the specifi- cation of the patent of March 19, 1845 (Brevets (^invention, new series, iv. 30). Of this an English translation is recorded in the specifi- cation of the patent of Du Buisson, No. 10,726 of the English patent office. (See also a paper on the history of this manufacture by F. H. Storer, in the " American Journal of Science," vol. xxx., pp. 121 and 254, 1860.) In this specification SeHigue describes first the ap- paratus employed in the distillation, in one form of which he makes use of superheated steam. The products of the distillation are then enumerated, which were as follows : 1, a very limpid whitish volatile oil, almost without odor, useful as a solvent or for illumination in suitable lamps, and sometimes known as naph- tha ; 2, a straw-colored oil, somewhat volatile, of specific gravity 0-84 to 0'87, almost odor- less, and suitable for burning in lamps in which the oil is kept at the same level, and which are provided with a double current of air, with a chimney, and proper burner ; 3, a heavier oil adapted for lubricating machinery; 4, a red coloring matter extracted from the different varieties of the oils ; 5, paraffine ; 6, a grease for lubricating machinery, being evidently a mixture of paraffine in little oil; 7, a black pitch, the residue of the distillation, suitable for coating wood, metals, &c., for their preser- vation ; 8, an alkaline soap prepared by treat- ing the oil with alkalies; 9, sulphate of am- monia; 10, fertilizing mixtures prepared with the ammoniacal liquors; 11, sulphate of alu- mina. The crude oil obtained from his retorts, which were like those of the gas works, he treated either before or after its being redis- tilled with a quantity of acid (sulphuric, mu- riatic, or nitric), and caused the mixture to be thoroughly agitated. This operation being con- tinued for some time, the tarry matters were partially freed from the oil, and on the mixture being left to repose they subsided with the acid, so that the purified oil could be drawn off from the top, bringing with it but little of the acid. This was neutralized by addition of an alkali, as the lye of soap boilers, and after the mixture had been well agitated again, more tar and coloring matter subsided, from which the oils were separated by decanting again and redis- tilling. By a series of fractional distillations the several sorts of light oils were obtained in a pure state. In 1846 Abraham Gesner made oil from coal in Prince Edward island, and was the first to give it the name kerosene. In Eng- land the establishment of the coal-oil manu- facture was due to the enterprise of James Young of Glasgow. In 1847 his attention was directed to the extraction of a lubricating oil from petroleum, which exuded from a coal mine in Derbyshire ; and having exhausted the sup- ply of this, he next applied to the same pur- pose the Torbanehill mineral or Boghead can- nel, a material which was first ascertained in 1850 to possess an unusual proportion of bitu- men, and to be capable of affording large quantities of gas. Mr. Young found it still better adapted for the manufacture of oil, and succeeded so well that in 1854, as he testified in a lawsuit for establishing his patent, his pro- duction of oil amounted to about 8,000 gallons a week, which sold for 5. a gallon. For the year the sales reached about 100,000, a large proportion of which was profit. Such success soon led others to undertake the manufacture, and coal-oil works rapidly increased in England, and were introduced into the United States. The first factory of the kind in this country was that of the kerosene oil company, on New- town creek, Long Island, opposite the upper part of New York city, which went into op- eration in June, 1854. It was designed to work the Boghead cannel or other materials of similar character that might be brought to New York from New Brunswick or Nova Scotia, or from the western coal mines; and the operations were to be conducted under the patent of Mr. Young, granted to him in this country as well as in England, for the exclu- sive use of coal for this manufacture. His claim, however, was not recognized at other works of later date in the United States, and was never enforced. In 1856 the Breckenridge coal-oil works at Cloverport, Ky., on the Ohio river, were producing oil from the cannel coal of the vicinity, which somewhat resembled the Boghead cannel in appearance and in its rich bituminous character; and the same year a factory was built in Perry co., Ohio. The can- nel coals of this region proving to be well adapted for this application, several other fac- tories were soon constructed, particularly in the vicinity of Newark, Licking co., Canfield, Mahoning co., and in Coshocton co. ; and at the close of the year 1860 the total number in Ohio was probably not less than 25, and there were also many in other states. The processes pursued in the different works were essentially the same. The only distinctions of importance were in the forms of the apparatus, and par- ticularly in the retorts. The common form in