Oct. 4--Samuel M. Kier watched as the lamp burned, and hoped the fuel he was testing would give off a brilliant light with no smoke.

The Pittsburgh businessman already had sold petroleum sopped from around his father's salt wells as medicine. With sales declining, he was looking for a new use for the greasy, greenish liquid.

Kier tested hundreds of lamps made to burn coal, whale and other oils before fashioning a burner for his fuel. He built a refinery along Downtown's Seventh Avenue that was the first in the Western Hemisphere, and his achievements in the late 1840s and early 1850s helped to develop the worldwide petroleum industry.

Edwin Drake's well would focus national attention on the Titusville area a few years later. But Kier and other Pittsburghers provided the technology, business know-how and financing to make their city America's first oil capital, a center for petroleum refining, trading and tool-making until the late 19th century.

"Pittsburgh always has had an entrepreneurial spirit. This is one example of it," said Alfred N. Mann, a retired chemical engineer who has studied the region's oil history.

But "total luck" also ushered in the city's oil boom, in the form of a cheap transportation route, he added. Oil Creek, in the heart of the first petroleum fields, flowed into the Allegheny River about 100 miles north of Pittsburgh, and the river took flatboats filled with crude to a city that had the labor and resources to refine and market it.

Just a waste product

Petroleum was a nuisance to early settlers in Western Pennsylvania.

Native Americans of the Seneca nation had taught them to use it as a salve, and to swallow it to relieve a range of ailments. Small quantities were on the ground's surface. But when the settlers dug wells to bring up brine they could boil down into salt, petroleum often came up, too.

Some managed to sell it. Nathaniel Carey, who lived along Oil Creek, collected oil from a spring, loaded it onto his horse in two 5-gallon barrels and traveled to Pittsburgh to sell it to get supplies. By the early 1800s, rafts from the oil region were carrying small quantities to the city, along with the far more important lumber shipments.

Lewis Peterson Jr. of Allegheny City, now the North Side, owned an interest in a salt well in Tarentum and, at one point, offered a reward for anyone who could use the excess oil.

Later, he solved the problem himself. Peterson had owned a cotton-spinning business that was destroyed in Pittsburgh's great fire of 1845. Later that year, he took petroleum to the Hope Cotton Factory off Lacock Street, near where Allegheny Center is now, and the managers there found it worked better for lubricating cotton spindles than the commonly used whale oil.

The company ordered two barrels per week from Peterson, but petroleum's use as a lubricant wouldn't be widely known until years later.

Kier ran several businesses during his lifetime. In the mid-1840s, he and his father, Thomas, were busy with two salt wells they owned near Tarentum, and they often dumped the useless petroleum by-product into the nearby Pennsylvania Canal.

A mishap one night signaled its possibilities. A group of boys, according to one account, threw a hot branding iron into the canal near the Kiers' property, igniting a brilliant fire that they had to let burn itself out.

Gradually, Kier became more intrigued with petroleum.

His wife was taking medicinal oil similar to what his wells produced. So, Kier began selling half-pints of what he called "rock oil" for 50 cents through sales agents who traveled in gilded wagons that featured pictures of the Bible's Good Samaritan.

"He was the first one to give any value to petroleum products," said Neil McElwee, a historian who studies Pennsylvania's oil regions. "Prior to that, it was just waste. Farmers would use it on their animals and burn lard oil for light."

'The magic elixir'

Kier, working from an office on Liberty Street, now Liberty Avenue, sold his petroleum as a remedy for health problems ranging from blotchy skin to diarrhea, but he soon turned to experiments with lighting.

By purifying the oil, Kier figured, he could make a cheaper, easier-to-get illuminant than the whale oil in common use then.

He built a simple one-barrel still at Seventh and Grant streets, where the U.S. Steel Tower is now. By 1850, he was distilling petroleum and selling it for $1.50 per gallon.

Four years later, Kier enlarged the operation to a five-barrel still that is considered to be the first refinery.