Astral Oil Works was an American oil company specializing in illuminating oil, and based in Brooklyn, New York. Astral Oil was a high-quality kerosene used in lamps and noted for being relatively safe. It was founded by Charles Pratt. Charles Pratt and Company (including Astral Oil) became part of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust in 1874, although the fact that Astral Oil was a New York branch of Standard Oil in Ohio was not made public until 1892. History 1850s-1860s: Background and formation Astral Oil Works was founded in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, New York, by Charles Pratt. Pratt was a pioneer of the petroleum industry who later formed Charles Pratt and Company with Henry H. Rogers. As a young man, Pratt had joined a company in Boston, Massachusetts which specialized in paints and whale oil products. In 1850 or 1851 he moved to New York City, where he worked for a similar company. Pratt realized that whale oil could be replaced by petroleum ("natural oil") distillates to light lamps. He became a pioneer of the petroleum industry as new wells were established in western Pennsylvania in the 1860s. He soon established his kerosene refinery, Astral Oil Works, in Brooklyn, New York. In the mid-1860s, Pratt met two aspiring young men, Charles Ellis and Henry H. Rogers in western Pennsylvania, and later purchased the entire future output of their small venture, Wamsutta Oil Refinery near Oil City, at a fixed price. Pratt had previously bought whale oil from Ellis in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and had done business with Rogers in the Pennsylvania oil fields starting in 1861. After five years in the oil fields, in 1866 Pratt asked Rogers to come to the Brooklyn side of Pratt's business. In 1867, Pratt built “America’s first modern oil refinery (Astral Oil) on the banks of Newtown Creek.” Over 50 other oil refineries were then founded along the East River from Williamsburg to Greenpoint, in the same area. While spending eight years in the Brooklyn refinery starting in 1866, Rogers, according to The New York Times, “invented the machinery by which naphtha was first successfully separated from the crude oil. This invention not only made the way for all that has been done since [in 1909] in the use of naphtha and its kindred products, but it made the handling and use of the residual oil far safer than it had ever