Caspar Neumann, The chemical works of Caspar Neumann / abridged and methodized, with large additions: containing the later discoveries and improvements made in chemistry and the arts depending thereon by William Lewis, New York: J. J. Audubon, 1840-44.
Ancient Sunlight
Much of the energy used throughout human history has been derived from light and heat radiated by the sun. Plants process sunlight into calories; humans consume plants (or the animals that consume them) for nourishment; water is evaporated by heat and deposited as rain at elevations where gravity plies it downward back to the sea. Even wind is a result of the sun’s interaction with the atmosphere and mechanics of our planet. Today’s world is largely powered by the development and combustion of ancient reserves of sunlight: sedimented dead plants and organisms that have been chemically altered over millennia by pressure and heat in the earth’s crust to form petroleum, coal, natural gas, and other types of organic matter that we now refer to as fossil fuels. The term “fossil fuel” was first used by German chemist Caspar Neumann in the index of the 1759 English translation of The Chemical Works of Caspar Neumann. The page on “Bituminous Substances” refers to production of petroleum (from the Latin, meaning “rock oil”) in the Middle East.
Pennsylvania was named for its abundant forests and the founder of its European colony, William Penn. But while the commonwealth’s woods were its first major source of energy, it’s the fossil fuel resources deep below Pennsylvania land, preserved in geologic layers thousands of feet deep, that have placed the state at the center of industrial energy production for long periods over the last 200 years. Large swaths of Pennsylvania lie over major deposits of bituminous and anthracite coal, which were first mined in the late 1700s at Coal Hill in Pittsburgh. The modern oil industry began in Pennsylvania with the drilling of the first commercial oil well by Edwin Drake in Titusville. Today, the U.S. is a leading global energy producer thanks in large part to the development of liquid natural gas in the Marcellus Shale region, a section of the state lying over a geologic formation that likely formed 400 million years ago. The displayed graph from Pennsylvania’s Mineral Heritage illustrates the geologic formations from which these fortunes are mined.
Caspar Neumann
The chemical works of Caspar Neumann / abridged and methodized, with large additions: containing the later discoveries and improvements made in chemistry and the arts depending thereon by William Lewis.
New York: J. J. Audubon, 1840-44.
Pennsylvania Department of Internal Affairs, Bureau of Statistics
Pennsylvania’s mineral heritage: The commonwealth at the economic crossroads of her industrial development
Harrisburg : Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Dept. of Internal Affairs
1944