Naphtha
3 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Naphtha. All 3 are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
naf'tha or nap'tha, a colorless liquid obtained in the distillation of petroleum. It evaporates readily. It is used as a substitute for turpentine in the manufacture of paints and varnishes. Naphtha takes up grease readily and is used in cleaning gloves, the collars of soiled clothing, etc. It is also used as fuel to furnish heat or to produce steam, especially in naphtha launches and for some purposes as a substitute for gasoline. Crude petroleum yields from six to twelve per cent of its own weight of naphtha. Naphtha contains no oxygen, and is therefore used by chemists to preserve potassium and other metals which have a strong affinity for oxygen. It is volatile and inflammable; great care must be exercised to prevent its vapor catching fire on approach of a flame of any kind. The principal kinds of naphtha in commercial use are native naphtha, coal naphtha, paraffine oil, shale naphtha, and naphtha from caoutchouc. Bitumen and asphaltum are closely allied substances in a solid form. See Petroleum
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a word derived from the Persian word nafata, "to exude," and originally applied to liquid hydrocarbons in the which exude from the ground neighborhood of the Caspian Sea. It was found applied also to the natural oils more or less plentifully in nearly all countries of the world, and to the oil Scotdistilled from Boghead mineral in land. But the inconvenience and danger of classing all these oils indiscriminately after the as naphthas became apparent Scotch paraffin and the American petrooils began to be used for leum refined domestic illumination. The word naphtha is properly applied to the lighter oils pass off first in the distillation of which petroleum, with gravity ranging from 90 to 62° Beaumé.
The Encyclopedia of Founding (1892)
This word is derived from the Persian (to exude), and was originally applied to an inflammable liquid hydro-carbon which exudes from the soil in certain parts of Persia. The term is, however, now used to designate a similar and almost identical fluid that issues from the ground in many parts of the world, and is known as petroleum, rock-oil, etc., but the term is also applied to other liquids which resemble true naphtha in little else than in their volatility and inflammability, as methylic alcohol or wood-spirit, etc. See PETROLEUM.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The domestic uses these entries dwell on have all but vanished. Aiton's 1910 list of naphtha for cleaning gloves and soiled collars, and for fuelling naphtha launches, describes a trade killed off by fire losses and by cheap gasoline and electric motors; petroleum solvents sold for spot cleaning were later restricted as benzene and related aromatics were recognised as carcinogens. Today naphtha is chiefly a refinery cut sold in bulk to industry, fed to catalytic reformers to make gasoline components or steam-cracked into ethylene and propylene for plastics, so that a great deal of modern packaging begins as the light distillate Collier's described in 1921. The loose older sense survives only in odd corners, such as camp-stove white gas and painters' naphtha, and the Baume gravities Collier's quotes have given way to the API scale; Aiton's point that oxygen-free naphtha protects potassium still holds, though laboratories now generally keep the alkali metals under mineral oil.
Written for this edition, 2026.