I recently remarked on Twitter/X that one of the ‘jewish invention’ articles I never expect to write was concerning jews claims that they discovered invented petroleum/gasoline, but never-the-less here we are because they have claimed just that.
Marnie Winston-Macauley writes at ‘Aish’ that:
‘Oy, Have I Got Gas!
When you’re talking gas, who better to check with than We Jews (especially after a healthy serving of cholent!) Experts on all kinds of natural gas, of course petroleum wasn’t discovered by an Arab or a Texan. The credit properly goes to Austrian Jew, Abraham Shreiner, an amateur scientist who found one could use petroleum to light the world! (And no, I’m not guessing whether matches were or were not involved.) In 1853, he built a distillation plant, a year before US-ians “discovered” it.’ (1)
While Isidore Singer and Frederick Haneman in the 1906 edition of the ‘Jewish Encyclopaedia’ claimed as follows in their entry on Abraham Schreiner:
‘Austrian discoverer of petroleum; born in Galicia in the second decade of the nineteenth century; died after 1870. He was a merchant in Boryslaw, where he possessed some land. On this land was a hollow from which exuded a greasy, tarry secretion; this the farmers of the neighborhood had for a long time used as a kind of panacea. Schreiner took some of this stuff and, forming a ball of it, inserted therein a wick, which, when lighted, burned with a red flame. He now tried to distil the mass by filling an old iron pot with it and placing it upon the fire. The result was disastrous: the pot exploded, and the experimenter was severely injured. Schreiner, upon his recovery, went to an apothecary who sold him a distilling-apparatus and instructed him in its use. With this Schreiner succeeded in 1853 in producing petroleum, which he sold to the druggists in Drohobiez and in Sambor. Later he disposed of 100 pounds of it for 15 florins to the Lemberg chemist Nikolasen, who refined it and produced a colorless, clear liquid. The Austrian Northern Railway in 1854 bought 300 pounds of refined petroleum at 20 florins per hundredweight and tested it for illuminating purposes. Schreiner now sank wells and procured oil in larger quantities; but his buildings were twice burned, and after the last conflagration, in 1866, he became impoverished.
In the meantime the Americans had introduced petroleum to the world (1859), and Schreiner was no longer able to compete with them. He died a poor man at the age of about fifty.’ (2)
The Hebrew History Foundation by contrast is a little more circumspect and merely claims that Schreiner ‘laid the foundation for the [modern] petroleum industry’. (3)
This ‘jewish invention’ claim should have been a non-starter since the 1911 edition of the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’ in its entry on ‘Petroleum’ explains that petroleum/gasoline has been known, used and crudely refined for thousands of years with the first references to such being from ancient Mesopotamia.
It explains as follows:
‘Petroleum was collected for use in the most remote ages of which we have any records. Herodotus describes the oil pits near Ardericca (near Babylon), and the pitch spring of Zacynthus (Zante), whilst Strabo, Dioscorides and Pliny mention the use of the oil of Agrigentum, in Sicily, for illumination, and Plutarch refers to the petroleum found near Ecbatana (Kerkuk). The ancient records of China and Japan are said to contain many allusions to the use of natural gas for lighting and heating. Petroleum (“burning water”) was known in Japan in the 7th century, whilst in Europe the gas springs of the north of Italy led to the adoption in 1226 by the municipality of Salsomaggiore of a salamander surrounded by flames as its emblem. Marco Polo refers to the oil springs of Baku towards the end of the 13th century; the medicinal properties of the oil of Tegernsee in Bavaria gave it the name of “St Quirinus’s Oil” in 1436; the oil of Pechelbronn, Elsass, was discovered in 1498, and the “earth balsam” of Galicia was known in 1506. The earliest mention of American petroleum occurs in Sir Walter Raleigh’s account of the Trinidad pitch-lake in 1595; whilst thirty-seven years later, the account of a visit of a Franciscan, Joseph de la Roche d’Allion, to the oil springs of New York was published in Sagard’s Histoire du Canada. In the 17th century, Thomas Shirley brought the natural gas of Wigan, in Shropshire, to the notice of the Royal Society. In 1724 Hermann Boernaave referred to the oleum terrae of Burma, and “Barbados tar” was then well known as a medicinal agent. A Russian traveller, Peter Kalm, in his work on America, published in 1748, showed on a map the oil springs of Pennsylvania, and about the same time Raicevich referred to the “liquid bitumen” of Rumania.’ (4)
Nor was Schreiner even remotely the first person to synthesize petroleum/gasoline in the modern sense since as the 1911 edition of the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’ explains once again:
‘Modern Development and Industrial Progress – The first commercial exploitation of importance appears to have been the distillation of the oil at Alfreton in Derbyshire by James Young, who patented his process for the manufacture of paraffin in 1850. In 1853 and 1854 patents for the preparation of this substance from petroleum were obtained by Warren de la Rue, and the process was applied to the “Rangoon oil” brought to Great Britain from Yenangyaung in Upper Burma. The active growth of the petroleum industry of the United States began in 1859, though in the early part of the century the petroleum of Lake Seneca, N.Y., was used as an embrocation under the name of “Seneca oil,” and the “American Medicinal Oil” of Kentucky was largely sold after its discovery in 1829. The Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company was formed in 1854, but its operations were unsuccessful, and in 1858 certain of the members founded the Seneca Oil Company, under whose direction E. L. Drake started a well on Oil Creek, Pennsylvania. After drilling had been carried to a depth of 69 feet, on the 28th of August 1859, the tools suddenly dropped into a crevice, and on the following day the well was found to have “struck oil.” This well yielded 25 barrels a day for some time, but at the end of the year the output was at the rate of 15 barrels.’ (5)
Thus, we can already see that Schreiner’s distillation of gasoline/petroleum in Galicia in 1853 is around three years after James Young had done so in Derbyshire in England in 1850 – in fact this has been corrected to 1848 by subsequent research so it is in fact around five not three years earlier – (6) and was right around the time that Warren de la Rue submitted his first patent in Britain for the distillation of petroleum/gasoline.
The truth is the claim that Schreiner had anything to do with the discovery/invention of petroleum/gasoline was a myth propagated by a Viennese journalist named Hugo Warmholz in an article in 1884 in the upmarket publication ‘Vom Fels zum Meer’ and by an Austro-Hungarian Railway Inspector named Heinrich Gintl in an 1873 pamphlet for the World Exhibition in Vienna on the history of the petroleum/gasoline industry according to Valerie Schatzker’s research. (7)
It turns out that both Gintl and Warmholz merely took Schreiner’s claims at face value – another is that Schreiner falsely claimed to have invented the first kerosene lamp – (8) and merely repeated them as being ‘true’ without any attempt to validate them whatsoever. (9)
As Schatzker acerbically remarks:
‘Surprisingly, no one questioned how an uneducated man like Schreiner could have undertaken the difficult process of fractional distillation, the separation and classification of the chemical compounds in a mixture by their various boiling points.’ (10)
Put another way: Schreiner made it all up and predictably jews are still repeating his claims as if they were genuine to this day!
References
(1) https://aish.com/91795029/; also see https://aish.com/three-monumental-jewish-pioneers-levi-straus-abraham-schreiner-and-jacob-blaustein/
(2) https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13315-schreiner-abraham
(3) https://hebrewhistory.info/factpapers/fp001_auto.htm
(4) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Petroleum
(5) Idem.
(6) https://engineeringhalloffame.org/profile/james-young
(7) https://www.aapjstudies.org/index.php?id=244
(8) Idem.
(9) Idem.
(10) Idem.
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