Carbon Oil

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

From carbon +‎ oil.

Coined in the early 1850s in Pennsylvania by Samuel Martin Kier, an American industrialist who refined crude petroleum into an illuminant. Kier chose a marketable name for his new lamp fuel to emphasize both its petroleum origin and its difference from whale oil.

According to linguist Hans Kurath, this term may be heard from the western edge of the Alleghenies to beyond the Ohio line.[1]

Noun

Carbon Oil (uncountable)

  1. (obsolete, Western Pennsylvania) Distilled petroleum used as lamp oil; early kerosene.
    • 2020, “S. M. Kier., Petroleum, Pittsburgh”, in Virtual Museum of Historical Bottles and Glass‎[1]:
      ... lands near Tarentum, east of Pittsburgh, along the Allegheny River ... The region was also notorious for the pernicious infiltration of petroleum, called at the time Carbon Oil, which was a popular rather than scientific term.[2]

References

  1. ^ Kurath, Hans (1949), A Word Geography of the Eastern United States, University of Michigan Press, →ISBN
  2. ^ (2020). S. M. Kier. Petroleum Pittsburgh. Virtual Museum of Historical Bottles and Glass.
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