SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



drove off the volatile kerosene, which condensed again 

 as a liquid and was collected. 



James Curtis Booth, the consulting chemist whose 

 advice put Kier in the kerosene business, had found that 

 when he distilled crude petroleum carefully in labora- 

 tory apparatus, different products separated off at dif- 

 ferent temperatures. But Kier was interested in only 

 kerosene. This was his sole product, and in those free 

 and easy days he dumped the residue into the river. 



Petroleum is a mixture, a terrifically complex mix- 

 ture, of literally thousands of different gases, liquids, 

 and solids. Yet all these are composed of only two kinds 

 of atoms, carbon and hydrogen. These two are joined 

 together in a staggering number of combinations to 

 make a multitude of compounds called hydrocarbons. 



Now hydrocarbons are not haphazard combinations. 

 They are all constructed upon a marvelously simple 

 scheme, as plain and regular as the cells of the honey- 

 comb. If you follow through the simplest of these com- 

 pounds you see that they come in regular series of so 

 many hydrogen atoms ( H ) with so many carbon atoms 

 (C), the little number behind each telling how many 

 atoms of it are in this compound. The most familiar 

 hydrocarbons found in crude oil are the paraffins, of 

 which methane (CH4), ethane (C2H6), and propane 

 (CsHs) are the simplest members. They all contain 

 twice as many H atoms, plus two, as C's, so the chemist 

 lumps them under the general nickname formula, 



236 



