As a youth James Young had to struggle
hard for his education, eventually gaining distinction in chemistry at the
evening classes of the Andersonian University (now Strathclyde University)
where many distinguished Scots had given or attended lectures. While there
he met and befriended the famous explorer David Livingstone. This
relationship was to endure until Livingstone’s death in Africa many years
after.
After a brief spell lecturing in
chemistry in London, Young became manager of a chemical works near
Manchester, in the course of which he developed many new patents and
processes connected with dye stuffs. While there he became interested in
oil, and established a little business refining a natural oil seepage in a
Derbyshire Colliery.
That was the beginning. As the seepage
gradually dried up, Young cast around for other sources of oil and he found
what he wanted in a special coal from Bathgate in West Lothian. This coal,
Torbanite by name, gave a remarkable yield of crude oil when distilled in
simple apparatus. Young quickly patented the process, and established the
first truly commercial oil-works in the world at Bathgate in 1851. His
fortune was quickly made selling paraffin oil, lubricants for all kinds of
industries, wax, naptha and even fertilisers. When the reserves of Torbanite
eventually gave out he moved on to oil-shale which was near at hand,
abundant and cheap but not so rich in oil as Torbanite. With the expiry of
Young’s patent in 1864 the Scottish shale oil boom began and the rapid
emergence of an industry that was to last for 100 years.
Young’s Paraffin Light and Mineral Oil
Company Limited continued to grow and expanded its operations, selling
paraffin oil and paraffin lamps all over the world and earning for its
founder the affectionate nickname ‘Paraffin’ Young.
The success of the native mineral oil
industry was due to the fact that up till that time illuminating oils,
lubricants and waxes were largely drawn from animal and vegetable sources,
expensive, in short supply and often of poor quality. On the other hand
mineral oil was cheaper, better for most purposes and abundant. In addition
demand was growing rapidly under the impetus of the Industrial Revolution as
hundreds of thousands of new consumers came on to the market. Even the
development of overseas competition from natural oil in America, Russia and
the Far East did not succeed in extinguishing the Scottish industry for more
than a century, though times were often very hard. Advanced Scottish oil
technology together with the brilliance of our engineers and businessmen
ensured survival right up until 1962 when the last of the shale works was
finally abandoned and the first chapter in the history of the modern oil
industry closed.
James
Young, son of a Glasgow joiner, was the founding father of the modern oil
industry. Beginning in 1851 he established refineries in the Lothians
processing cannel-coal and oil-shale years before the 