Ignacy Łukasiewicz, a Polish pharmacist in Lwów, develops in 1853 the process for distilling crude oil to obtain kerosene and designs a kerosene lamp that uses it as fuel, installing it at the General Hospital of Lwów in July 1853 to light an emergency nighttime operation. That same year he drills the first oil well in Europe at Bóbrka (present-day Poland) with his partner Titus. Łukasiewicz's oil refinery and kerosene lamp precede those of the American Abraham Gesner (who patented kerosene in 1854) and Edwin Drake's wells in Pennsylvania (1859). The modern oil industry — which Rockefeller and Standard Oil would later scale — rests on this pioneering Polish work that rarely appears in Anglophone accounts of the birth of oil.