Creosote
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
Important: Safety Warning
This page recommends preserving food with chemicals such as salicylic acid, borax, or formaldehyde. These substances are toxic when eaten, and their use in food is now prohibited.
In addition, this page presents medical treatment from an era before modern medicine. The remedies described are ineffective against the conditions named, and some of the ingredients or doses are harmful. Do not use them to treat any illness; consult a qualified medical professional.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
kre'o-sot, a substance having the general appearance and qualities of carbolic acid . Creosote was prepared first from coal tar by repeated treatment with potash and acids, followed by distillation. It rises from the tar at a high temperature, 400 deg. to 760 deg. F. It is obtained also by the destructive distillation of wood. Pure creosote is an oily, heavy, colorless liquid. It refracts light powerfully. It has a sweet, burning taste and smells like a smoked ham. The word is from the Greek meaning flesh preserver. It is one of the strongest preservative agents known. Meat dipped in a one per cent solution of creosote is safer from spoiling than if smoked. Creosote water is used in medicine. It stimulates digestion and kills bacteria in the intestines. Creosote vapor is inhaled with helpful effect by consumptives, and by patients afflicted with bronchitis. Severe cases of nausea are sometimes relieved by creosote. Though less dangerous than carbolic acid, creosote should be used as a remedy only under competent advice. Creosote is added to whiskey to give the desired flavor of reeking peat, much as though the whiskey had been distilled over a smoking peat fire. Creosote is an excellent preservative of wood. By killing germs of decay it prevents dry rot; posts dipped in hot creosote last longer. In this respect the action is like that of tar. Owing to the advancing price of railroad ties treatment with creosote has been employed with excellent results. The life of a wooden pavement may be tripled by the use of creosote. The blocks are placed in a cylindrical steel drum; the air is first exhausted by an air-pump causing the vapors of the wood to pass off by expansion; creosote oil, boiling hot, is then introduced. By tumbling the blocks awhile in the drum, they are so impregnated with creosote that they become practically rot-proof. It is claimed that a pavement of creosoted blocks, well laid in boiling tar and gravel on a concrete foundation, will outwear and outlast several ordinary wooden pavements. The treatment of ties is not essentially different.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 entry treats creosote as both a food preservative and a medicine, with its vapour "inhaled with helpful effect by consumptives" — tuberculosis was in fact only brought under control by antibiotics from the 1940s, beginning with streptomycin, and creosote has no place in its treatment. Coal-tar creosote is now classed as a probable human carcinogen: in the United States the EPA has restricted it to licensed industrial wood treatment since the 1980s, and the European Union barred its sale to the general public in 2003. What survives is the timber use the entry describes at length — pressure-treated railway ties and utility poles are still creosoted much as it explains — though the creosoted wooden street pavements it praised were displaced by asphalt and concrete within a couple of decades. Adding creosote to whisky to counterfeit a peaty flavour would today be illegal adulteration; the smoky phenols in peated malt come from drying the barley over real peat smoke.
Written for this edition, 2026.