ABSTRACT
Kier sought the aid of a Philadelphia chemist, J.C. Booth, who converted an iron kettle into a primitive distillation unit. The vapors boiling off the ve barrels of Pennsylvania crude yielded about twenty liters of kerosene product per day. Kier originally planned to market this product as medicine too, but his design of a new lamp, which did not use whale oil as the fuel, created a ready market for his product. Kier’s rst renery for making what he called “carbon oil” was started up in the basement of a drugstore in Pittsburgh. Edison’s development of a practical electric light put an end to the need for kerosene for lighting, although it took a long time to do so. Even in the United States, which emerged from the Second World War as the world’s richest and most powerful nation, electricity was still not available in some rural areas until some years after the war.
