James Young
Young, James (1811-1883) was a Scottish chemist who pioneered in the petroleum industry. He created products from oil that seeped into an abandoned coal mine. He has been called the founding father of the modern oil industry.
Young was born in 1811 in Glasgow, Scotland. He worked as a carpenter with his father and studied chemistry part-time at Anderson's College in Glasgow. Young became an assistant to the chemistry professor, Thomas Graham, and worked with him at University College, London. He then began working in industry in Lancashire and Manchester.
In 1847, Young began to manufacture burning and lubricating oils from a spring of petroleum in a disused coal mine in Derbyshire. He thought, incorrectly, that the petroleum was formed from coal. He later succeeded in producing oil from deposits in a type of coal known as boghead coal, and obtained the same result from oil shale, a soft, fine-grained sedimentary rock. Heating oil shale releases crude oil and natural gas, though it takes huge quantities of rock to obtain a useful amount of oil. Scotland's shale industry grew from Young's work.
Young patented a process for distilling petroleum in 1850 and opened the world's first oil refinery. From 1865 to 1870, he owned Young's Paraffin Light & Mineral Oil Co.
Young was appointed president of Anderson's College in 1868 and founded a chair of technical chemistry. He also helped to finance the second and third African expeditions of his friend David Livingstone, the Scottish-born British explorer and missionary. After Livingstone's death in Africa in 1873, Young paid for his servants to return to Great Britain.
Young was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1873. He died in 1883 in Scotland.