Jan Zeh

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pharmacy in Lviv where Zeh worked

Jan Zeh (born July 2, 1817 in Łańcut , † January 26, 1897 in Borysław ) was a Polish entrepreneur and pharmacist .

Jan Zeh's parents were the pharmacist Johann Ludwig and his wife Kristine. The family had immigrated to Poland from Hungary two generations before he was born . After graduating from high school in Sambor , he began his apprenticeship in a pharmacy there in 1830, where he made his first acquaintance with oil. From 1844 to 1847 Zeh finally studied pharmacy in Vienna .

In 1848 Zeh began to work in Lviv in the pharmacy Pod Złotą Gwiazdą ( Eng . Under the Golden Star ) by Piotr Mikolasch (1805–1873), which was the largest pharmaceutical establishment in Galicia at the time. During this time he learned about a still for crude oil, the distillate of which was sold as medicine for sheep. However, by 1840 he lost track of it. In 1850 he received a patent for the reuse of steam in the steam engine.

In Drohobycz , two Jewish businessmen, Abraham Schreiner (1812–1898) and Leib Stiermann, were busy boiling mountain tar on wagon grease. Schreiner also tried to distill mountain oil and brought his cloudy, smelly, greenish distillate to the pharmacy. In 1852, Mikolasch had acquired a chemical and pharmaceutical laboratory, in which Zeh and Ignacy Łukasiewicz produced a clear, odorless kerosene in weeks of experiments . They used sulfuric acid and sodium for cleaning. In March 1853 the plumber Adam Bartkowski had built him an oil lamp and on May 27, 1853 he applied for a patent for his method for cleaning oil, which was issued in Vienna in December.

He received a license for his distillery in Drohobycz and opened an oil shop in a Lviv wooden house, where he also sold paraffin candles made from ozokerite . At the First General German Industrial Exhibition in Munich , he received an honorary diploma for his oil in 1854.

On February 12, 1858, he set fire to a puddle of kerosene in the shop. The shop burned down and his wife Dorothea, nee. Obłoczyńska (21) and her younger sister Hermina (17) perished. At the end of the year he opened a new shop on Theaterstrasse (pln. Ulica Teatralna ).

When the oil resources were exhausted in 1875, he received a license for a pharmacy in Borysław , which he opened in March 1876. In the same year he married Maria, the third sister with whom he had daughters Amelia and Stefania.

Individual evidence

  1. Muzeum przemys³u naftowego i etnografii w Libuszy: Jan Zeh
  2. ^ Alison Fleig Frank: Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia . Harvard University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-674-03718-9 , pp. 56 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  3. digitalis.uni-koeln.de: Swoboda, pp. 58 - 69 (PDF; 1.3 MB).