Today we discuss the birth and history of something that literally makes the world go round. A volatile fraction that was considered a waste product in the mid 1800s. A thing that has caused crisis and war. Today we discuss the birth of gasoline.

To start we need to go way back in time to when we were using kerosene lamps. You see kerosene was what they were after when Edwin Drake dug the first crude oil well in Titusville Pennsylvania in 1859. You see he distilled the oil to produce the kerosene.

A handful of other petroleum products, including what we would come to know as gasoline, was produced in the process and they had NO use for gasoline. They literally burned it off or discarded it.

So you see, gasoline wasn’t technically invented it was just what you would call a volatile fraction obtained by distilling crude oil.