“... with one distillation it gives a clear colorless liquid of brilliant illuminating power."
Lyon Playfair in a letter to James Young
In 1848 Scottish chemist James Young (1811-1883) spotted the potential of a natural oil seepage at a Derbyshire colliery. By 1850 he had taken out a patent for a process of extracting crude oil from cannel coal.
Young located a huge new source of coal, at Boghead Colliery in Bathgate, West Lothian, and in 1851 he built the world's first commercial oil refinery on the site. Young began a major industry that was to continue in full production for another fifty years, until the arrival of crude oil from the United States and the Middle East. Young's Paraffin Light and Mineral Oil Company sold paraffin oil and lamps and also produced naphtha, gas, coke, and ammonium sulfate. "Paraffin" Young, as he had become known, took out a U.S. patent for "parafinne oil" in 1852, which was to be a major blow to the business ambitions of the Canadian geologist Abraham Gesner, who had also learned to distill what he called kerosene. He and his associates began to market kerosene—made from albertite and cannel coal—in the United States in 1857, before having to admit defeat to both Young and the rapidly growing petroleum industry in Pennsylvania.
In the Austrian Empire, in the Carpathian region, Polish chemist Ignacy Lukasiewicz built an oil refinery in 1856, initially producing paraffin for local use, distilled from natural seep, or rock, oil. He would grow very wealthy on its and its successors' output.
