Petroleum in the Modern Age: A Puzzle That Lasted Four Centuries

Time: 12:00 to 1:00 p.m.

Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 315 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106

Event Type: Open to the Public

Fee: Free

RSVP Online: No Registration Required

The liquid hydrocarbon that, for its peculiar physical properties and composition, we call petroleum was known, harvested, and used for millennia. Several authors of the Classic Age and the Late Antiquity described petroleum and its uses and proposed theories on its origin. However, the knowledge about its real nature and composition was very limited, and only in the Early Modern Age did the cumulative process of knowledge begin to take shape that in a gradual and discontinuous manner matured into the modern concept of oil in the late 19th century. In the early 16th century the different kinds of liquid, semisolid, and solid petroleum (e.g., naphtha, bitumen, asphalt) seeping from the subsoil of Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, and Switzerland started to be systematically exploited and sold as lighter, grease, lubricant, medication, and insulation for roofs and hulls; the clear and lightweight variant of naphtha was considered a valuable commodity and was sold at high prices in sealed bottles.

There is a span of about four centuries from the “Geneva Pamphlet” (anonymous, 1480) on the medical uses of Pétrol, the early innovative elements introduced in the study of oil by such authors as Georg Agricola (1546) and Andreas Libavius (1601), and the deciphering of the chemical composition of oil—a compound of carbon and hydrogen—proposed by Michael Faraday in the 1820s. During this time the studies on oil benefited from the rapid advances and brilliant insights of authors like Volck (1625), Pomet (1694), D’Eyrinis (1721), Hoeffel (1734), and Maquer (1758), although there were also moments of stagnation and disappointing regressions.

Francesco’s lecture aims to frame and contextualize the theories, interpretations, and speculations of natural philosophers, chemists, and finally geologists that made petroleum a “marvel of nature.”

Francesco Gerali is a research assistant at the School of Library and Information Studies of the University of Oklahoma and an honorary research fellow at the History Department of the University of Western Australia. His expertise is in the fields of digital humanities and history of the oil industry. His PhD dissertation in the history of science was on one of the first Italian geologists involved in petroleum geology and exploration. Since 2010 he has worked in Italy, the United States, Mexico, and recently Australia, specializing in historical studies on the scientific and technological development of the oil industry in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Francesco’s research methodology aims at the merging of hard sciences (i.e., geology and engineering) with the humanities in order to interpret and translate complex scientific and technical concepts into historical analyses. He employs and integrates multiple databases and sources in English, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Latin, and he has developed a special ability to process high volumes of information from government documents, technical journals, company records, and scholarly literature.

Brown Bag Lectures (BBLs) are a series of weekly informal talks on the history of chemistry or related subjects, including the history and social studies of science, technology, and medicine. Based on original research (sometimes still in progress), these talks are given by local scholars for an audience of CHF staff and fellows and interested members of the public.

For more information, please call 215.873.8289 or e-mail bbl@chemheritage.org.