James Young (chemist)

James Young was a Scottish chemist known as the father of the oil industry, who in 1850 patented a process for distilling paraffin oil and paraffin wax from cannel coal and later from oil shale, founding the worlds first commercial mineral oil industry in Scotland before petroleum drilling existed anywhere. Youngs Bathgate works refined shale oil into lamp oil, lubricants and paraffin wax at industrial scale years before Edwin Drakes 1859 Pennsylvania oil well, making Youngs shale oil process the direct predecessor of the modern petroleum refining industry. His patented distillation methods were later applied directly to crude petroleum once drilled oil became available, and the refining principles he established underpinned the young petroleum industry as it grew in the following decades. The Scottish shale oil industry he founded operated for over a century after his death.