City Tech Associate Professor of Chemistry Peter Spellane has recently published Chemical and Petroleum Industries at Newtown Creek (Springer, 2022), an informative book blending history, science, and commerce along New York’s 19th-century waterfront. Inspiration for the book, Spellane explains, began while participating alongside City Tech colleagues in an interdisciplinary 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant, “Water and Work: The History and Ecology of the Brooklyn Waterfront.” Spellane’s study also draws on period documents he found in collections at the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Cooper Union Library, the New-York Historical Society, the Library of Congress, and other archives.

An intriguing old map offered the first clues to the wealth of material for his book project: “I chanced upon a copy of an 1880s map of Newtown Creek in the library at the Brooklyn Historical Society. The map indicated the waterfront locations of manufacturers that I recognized as early versions of several modern chemicals and petroleum manufacturing companies.”

At the New York Public Library, he writes in the introduction to his book, additional maps “revealed the proximities of production sites to one another and to railways, canals, and harbors; maps from different periods revealed the evolution and advances of the several industries at Newtown Creek. The maps suggested an economic geography that made me want to understand New York City’s history of production of chemicals.”

The book traces the evolution and impact of early chemical industries along the New York waterfront, specifically on Newtown Creek. As Spellane illustrates, early pioneers such as Peter Cooper, Martin Kalbfleisch, Abraham Gesner, J. B. F. Herreshoff, and Charles Pratt developed ingenious new chemical technologies, helping to make New York the center of advanced manufacture of reagent chemicals, production of kerosene, and refining of petroleum in the United States.  Spellane notes that these production technologies had “profound consequences for the practice of industrial chemistry in the U.S., for the economic vitality of the City of New York, and for the site’s ecology.”

His book follows the careers of well-known and some not so well-known figures and the impacts of their chemical innovations.  We learn that Peter Cooper, who later established the Cooper Union, opened a glue-making factory in Bushwick in the late 1830s, extracting proteins from the hides and hooves of dead horses. Martin Kalbfleisch began his career in New York along Newtown Creek. Kalbfleisch was New York’s principal manufacturer of sulfuric acid, the reagent essential to the growth of a fertilizers industry. Equally compelling is the story of Abraham Gesner, who developed a method for extracting and refining from bituminous coal, a lamp oil that he named “kerosene.” Kerosene saved the lives of many whales: kerosene was much less expensive than spermaceti or whale oil. Ideal for lubricating machinery, whale oil had become too costly to burn.

Spellane reports that, when petroleum was tapped in western Pennsylvania in 1859, petroleum displaced coal oil as a source of kerosene. Soon thereafter, Charles Pratt (who later founded the Pratt Institute) established his Astral Oil Works, a petroleum refinery along Newtown Creek. Pratt’s effort helped integrate oil production and refining. Pratt’s refinery became an object of desire for John D. Rockefeller, who had established the Standard Oil Company in Cleveland but soon relocated the company to New York. New York, with its brilliant harbor, became the leading center of petroleum refining and export.

Such gems of knowledge fill Spellane’s text, an inside look at how innovators in chemical science played a key part driving New York City’s “ambition,” “capital,” and “inclination for expansion” in the late nineteenth century and beyond.

Spellane has taught general and organic chemistry at City Tech since 2003. He served as Department Chair from 2008-2015, a period that saw the development of two new degree programs: an AS in Chemical Technology and a BS in Applied Chemistry.

“Integrating history with technology, and understanding the chemicals industry in this country and its early presence in New York City, enables me to think about and to present to chemistry students the significance of industrial chemistry to the lives we know:  the luminescent materials in our cell phones, the real and fake foods we eat, the workings of ribonucleic acids, the biological generation of pathogens, and the development of medicines we use to keep ourselves healthy,” Spellane notes.