摘要：

Ignacy Lukasiewicz looks mildly frustrated in his portrait that shows him sitting at his desk, a massive textbook in front of him and a distillation apparatus in the background. Perhaps he looks frustrated in the 1880s because he already has a foreboding that only 150 years later, his lifelong passion would be doomed. A trained pharmacist Lukasiewicz investi- gated mineral oil in his native Poland for medicinal applications when he realized its potential for illumination. At that time whale blubber was the fuel of choice for oil lamps but the light was miserable, smelled awful and burned with a lot of soot. Lukasiewicz distilled mineral oil to kerosene but could not make it work in the traditional oil lamp therefore he invented the kerosene lamp. Thus he contributed to the first oil boom and is one of the pioneers of the oil based chemical industry. Nowadays, mineral oil is on the downgrade and even if there's still quite a bit left in the natural reservoirs, we have to face the fact that we are using a finite resource. Shale gas may come to the rescue temporarily, but aside from environmental concerns it also comes with the clock ticking -mild frustration included.

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