by Bruce Wells | Jan 29, 2024 | This Week in Petroleum History
January 29, 1850 – Kerosene Inventor patents Gasification Process –
Canadian geologist Abraham Gessner received a U.S. patent for a gas manufacturing process, “to enable others skilled in the art…for obtaining of illuminating gas from compact and fluid bitumen (crude oil), asphaltum, chapapote, or mineral pitch as found in mines, quarries and springs in the earth.” (more…)
by Bruce Wells | Jan 22, 2024 | Petroleum Pioneers
Once called night riders of the hemlocks, petroleum sleuths separated oil well fact from fiction.
In the hard winter of 1888, 37-year-old oil scout Justus C. McMullen succumbed to pneumonia — contracted while investigating oil production from a well in densely wooded hills near Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.
McMullen, publisher of the Bradford “Petroleum Age” newspaper, already had contributed much to America’s early petroleum industry as a journalist and oilfield detective.
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