HARD TO REALISE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 2, Issue 244, 2 December 1940, Page 7

HARD TO REALISE

PETROL AS WASTE PRODUCT AN AMERICAN VIEWPOINT It is hard tc, believe in this day of gas-eating automobiles, but there wss a time when gasoline was a waste product. The oil industry didn't know what to do with it. Think of that, next time you watch the clock hand on the filling station gas tank whirl merrily around— clink, clink.

A model of the first oil refinerjf built by the late John D. Rockefeller is on exhibit at the Field Museum of Natural History at Chicago. When Mr Rockefeller built the original in 18(53, at Cleveland, Ohio, oil refineries were chiefly interested in making kerosene for lamps, the museiim says. This done, great quan tities of gasoline remained as a byproduct. And, what to do with it? There .were no automobiles, 110 airplanes, farm tractors, motorships nor many of the other modern-day contraptions that run by internal combustion. The first refinery ever built, says Henry W. Nichols, Chief Curator of Geology at the Museum, wag manufactured eight years previously, in 1855. jprimitive in construction, it produced a kerosene that sold at 1.25 dollars a gallon.