Quotes About Gesner

Gesner concentrated on developing a fuel for lighting. He used the pitch he had collected in Trinidad as feedstock, conducting some two thousand separate experiments. By 1846, he had successfully distilled coal oil, as it was commonly called, from this bitumen.

Gesner's US patents were issued in June 1854. For feedstock, his company would initially use cannel coal from New Brunswick.

In the meantime, Gesner kept busy perfecting kerosene. The crude coal oil that emerged from his stills smoked badly when it burned and smelled worse. After treating the oil with acids and processing it with lime, he succeeded in creating a kerosene that burned, he reported, "with a brilliant white light [and] without smoke or the naphthalous odor so offensive in many hydrocarbons having some resemblance to this but possessing very different properties.