March 26, 1885] 



NA TURE 



495 



point," as to entitle them to be considered as safe, under all 

 ordinary condition-;, as vegetable or animal oils. The evidence 

 elicited at the coroner's inquest showed that one of the boys of 

 the Goliath, whose duty it was, at the time, to trim the lamps used 

 in the ship, to place them in position and remove and extinguish 

 them in the morning, and to whom this work had been but recently 

 allotted, let fall a lamp which, after having lowered the flame, 

 he had carried from its assigned position into the lamp- or 

 trimming-room, and which he could hold no longer on account 

 of its heated state. The heated oil was scattered upon the 

 floor, and was apparently at once inflamed by the burning wick 

 of the lamp ; the floor of the room was it appears, much im- 

 pregnated with oil which had been let drop from time to time 

 by lads employed upon the work of lamp-trimming ; hence the 

 flame attacked the apartment generally with considerable 

 rapidity, and a wind blowing at the time caused the fire to 

 spread through the vessel so very quickly as to compel many of 

 those composing the crew to jump overboard, and to render the 

 rescue of the boys from burning or drowning a difficult matter. 

 The occurrence of this accident was made the occasion, in some 

 of the public papers, to decry petroleum oil as a dangerous 

 illuminating agent, although it was proved that the particular 

 oil used at the time when the fire occurred had so unusually high 

 a flashing-point that the consequent inferiority of its burning 

 quality had been made the subject of complaint. This low 

 volatility of the oil has been occasionally regarded as one very 

 important element of safety in reference to its employment in 

 lamps, but the lecturer will presently have to refer to circum- 

 stances which do not substantiate this view. At any rate, 

 however, although the heated oil which was spilled on to 

 the floor from the lamp was in a condition favourable to imme- 

 diate ignition by the burning wick, it is not at all likely that the 

 fire would have extended almost at once with uncontrollable 

 violence, especially in face of the excellent discipline ami 

 arrangements in case of fire which were shown to have existed 

 in the Goliath, if the scrupulous cleanliness and care had been 

 enforced which were essential in a room where lamp-filling and 

 trimming were regularly carried out, and where it was necessary 

 to keep some supply of oil for current consumption. Instead of 

 this, the floor, and probably therefore other parts of the room, 

 appear to have been in a condition most favourable to the rapid 

 propagation of the flame ; moreover, the evidence as to proper 

 care having been taken to keep the supply of oil required for 

 current use in such a way as to guard against its being accident- 

 ally spilled, or to impress the boys employed upon the work 

 with the great importance of care and cleanliness, was by no 

 means satisfactory, and there can be little doubt that this cata- 

 strophe has to be classed among the numerous accidents of a 

 readily avertible kind which have contributed to lead the public 

 to form an exaggerated estimate of the dangerous character of 

 petroleum oil as an illuminan'. 



The employment of liquid hydrocarbons as competitors with 

 animal and vegetable oils in lamps for domestic use is of com- 

 paratively recent origin, although petroleum or mineral naphtha 

 in its crude or native conditions was used at a very early date in 

 Persia and in Japan, in lamps of primitive construction, while 

 in Italy it \va- similarly employed about a century ago. 



The application of the most volatile products of coal distilla- 

 tion to illuminating purposes in a crude way appears to have 

 originated, so far as Great Britain is concerned, with the work- 

 ing of a patent taken out by Lord Dundonald in 1781, for the 

 distillation of coal, not with a view to producing gas, but for the 

 production of naphtha, brown or heavy oil, and tar. 



In 1820, at about the linn: when gas-lighting was being estab- 

 lished in London, : , sold coal-naphtha in the metro- 

 polis for illuminating purposes; but the first really successful 

 introduction of naphtha as an illuminating agent was made by 

 Mr. Astley shortly afterwards, through the agency of the so- 

 called 1 ounders' blast-lamp, which came into use for workshops 

 and yards in factories, and of the naphtha lamp of Read Holli- 

 day, of Huddersfield, with which we are well acquainted to this 

 day, as, although it never became a success for internal illumina- 

 tion of houses, it still continues in extensive use almost in its 

 original form, by itinerant salesmen and showmen. 



In the Founders' lamp a current of air, artificially established, 

 was made to impinge upon the flame and thus to greatly assist 

 the combustion of the crude heavy oil used in it. 



In the Holliday naphtha lamp the spirit finds its way slowly 

 rom the reservoir throng! i apillary tube to a small chamber 



placed at a lower level, which has a number of circumferential 

 perforations, and is in fact at the same time the burner of the 

 lamp and the vapour producer which furnishes the continuous 

 supply of illuminant, the liquid supplied to the chamber being 

 vaporised by the heat of the jets of flame which are fed by its 

 production. 



Between 1S30 and 1850 the knowledge of the production not 

 only of oils but also of paraffin by the distillation of coal or 

 shale became considerably developed by Reichenbach, Christi- 

 son, Mitscherlich, Kane, du Boisson, and others, and the prac- 

 tical success attained by the latter was soon eclipsed by that of 

 Mr. James Young, who, after establishing oil distillation at 

 Alfreton from the Derbyshire petroleum, began to distil oils 

 from the Bathgate mineral in 1S50, and soon developed this 

 industry to a remarkable extent. 



The first lamps for burning liquid hydrocarbon which com- 

 peted for domestic use, in this country, with the superior kinds 

 of lamps, introduced after 1835, in which animal or vegetable 

 oils were burned (solar lamps and moderator lamps), were the 

 so-called camphine lamps (known as the Vesta and Paragon 

 lamps) in which carefully rectified oil of turpentine was used. 

 They gave a brilliant light, but soon acquired an evil reputation 

 as being dangerous, and liable, upon the least provocation, 

 especially if exposed to slight draughts, to fill the air with 

 adhesive soot- flakes. 



After a time Messrs. George Miller and Co., of Glasgow (who 

 held for a time the concession of the products manufactured by 

 Mr. Young) tried with some amount of success to use the lighter 

 products from the boghead mineral in the camphine lamp, but 

 the chief aim of Mr. Young appears to have been to produce the 

 heavier oil suitable for lubricating purposes, the light oil or 

 naphtha meeting with an indifferent demand as a solvent, in 

 competition with coal-tar naphtha, in the manufacture of india- 

 rubber goods. He, however, himself used the mineral oil pro- 

 duced at Alfreton in Argand lamps in the earliest days of his 

 operations ; a small sale of the Bathgate oil took place about 

 1852-53 for use in Argand lamps, and the earliest description of 

 lamp employed in Germany, where the utilisation of mineral oil 

 as a domestic illuminant was first ^developed, appears to have 

 been of the Argand type. 



In 1853 a demand sprang up for the lighter paraffin oils in 

 Germany. For three or four years previously a burning oil was 

 distilled from schist or brown coal at Hamburg by a Frenchman 

 named Noblee, who gave it the name of photogem. The exist- 

 ence in Glasgow of a considerable supply of the oils became 

 known to a German agent, and after they had been exported 

 from Glasgow to Hamburg for a considerable time it was found 

 that the chief purchaser was Mr. C. H. Stobwasser, of Berlin, 

 who appears to have originated the really successful employment 

 of mineral oils in lamps for domestic use, and to have been the 

 first to bring out the flat-wick burners for these oils. After a 

 time Messrs. Young discovered the destination of their oil, and, 

 having brought over a number of German lamps, for which a 

 ready sale was found, commenced the lamp manufacture upon a 

 large scale, and rapidly developed the trade in mineral (or 

 paraffin) oil for burning purposes, which attained to great im- 

 portance some time before the American petroleum oils entered 

 the market. In 1859 a firm in Edinburgh supplied Young's 

 company with nearly a quarter of a million of burners for lamps, 

 and it was not until 1S59 that the foundation of the United 

 States' petroleum history was laid by Col. G. L. Drake, who 

 first struck oil (in Pennsylvania) at a depth of 71 feet, obtaining 

 at once a supply of 1000 gallons per day. The lamps first used 

 ; were probably of German make, but it need hardly 

 lie said that the lamp manufacture was speedily developed to a 

 gigantic extent in that country. Some of the earliest lamps for 

 burning mineral oil in dwellings which were produced in Ger- 

 many and in Scotland, possess considerable interest as ingenious 

 devices for promoting the perfect and steady combustion of the 

 oil, ami as attempts to dispense with the necessity of the chimney 

 for the production of a steady light. In one of these a small 

 lamp was introduced into the base or stand of the lamp proper, 

 and a tube passed from over this little lamp, through the oil 

 reservoir into the burner, so as to supply the latter with heated 

 air. In another, a small fan or blower, with simple clockwork 

 attached, to keep it in rapid motion, is placed in the stand, and 

 supplies the flame with a rapid current of air. Among other 

 workers at the perfection of mineral oil lamps was the late Dr. 

 Angus Smith, who produced a double-wick lampsome years before 

 the beautiful duplex-lamps were first manufactured by Messrs. 



