Английский язык на слух по аудиокниге 'The History of the Standard Oil Company'

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While it was admitted to be chiefly a liniment it was recommended for cholera morbus, liver complaint, bronchitis and consumption, and the dose i prescribed was three teaspoonfuls three times a day! Mr. Kier's circulars are crowded with testimonials of the efficacy of rock-oil, dated anywhere between 1848 and 1853. Although his trade in this oil was so extensive he was not satisfied that petroleum was useful only as a medicine. He was interested in it as a lubricator and a luminant. That petroleum had the qualities of both had been discovered at more than one point before 1850. More than one millowner in the districts where petroleum had been found was using it in a crude way for oiling his machines or lighting his works, but though the qualities of both lubricator and luminant were present, the impurities of the natural oil were too great to make its use general. Mr. Kier seems to have been the first man to have attempted to secure an expert opinion as to the possibility of refining it. In 1849 he sent a bottle of oil to a chemist in Philadelphia, who advised him to try distilling it and burning it in a lamp. Mr. Kier followed the advice, and a five-barrel still which he used in the fifties for refining petroleum is still to be seen in Pittsburg. His trade in the oil he produced at his little refinery was not entirely local, for in 1858 we find him agreeing to sell to Joseph Coffin of New York at 62 cents a gallon 100 barrels of "carbon oil that will burn in the ordinary coal-oil lamp."