The use of coal-tar creosote on a commercial scale began in 1838, when a patent covering the use of creosote oil to treat timber was taken out by inventor John Bethell. The "Bethell process"—or as it later became known, the full-cell process—involves placing wood to be treated in a sealed chamber and applying a vacuum to remove air and moisture from wood "cells". The wood is then pressure-treated to imbue it with creosote or other preservative chemicals, after which vacuum is reapplied to separate the excess treatment chemicals from the timber. Alongside the zinc chloride-based "Burnett process", use of creosoted wood prepared by the Bethell process became a principal way of preserving railway timbers (most notably railway sleepers) to increase the lifespan of the timbers, and avoiding having to regularly replace them.
Besides treating wood, it was also used for lighting and fuel. In the beginning, it was only used for lighting needed in harbour and outdoor work, where the smoke that was produced from burning it was of little inconvenience. By 1879, lamps had been created that ensured a more complete combustion by using compressed air, removing the drawback of the smoke. Creosote was also processed into gas and used for lighting that way. As a fuel, it was used to power ships at sea and blast furnaces for different industrial needs, once it was discovered to be more efficient than unrefined coal or wood. It was also used industrially for the softening of hard pitch, and burned to produce lamp black. By 1890, the production of creosote in the United Kingdom totaled approximately 29,900,000 gallons per year.
In 1854, Alexander McDougall and Robert Angus Smith developed and patented a product called McDougalls Powder as a sewer deodorant; it mainly consisted of carbolic acid derived from creosote. McDougall, in 1864, experimented with his solution to remove entozoa parasites from cattle pasturing on a sewage farm. This later led to widespread use of creosote as a cattle wash and sheep dip. External parasites would be killed in a creosote diluted dip, and drenching tubes would be used to administer doses to the animals stomachs to kill internal parasites.
Creosoted wood blocks were a common road-paving material in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but ultimately fell out of favor because they did not generally hold up well enough over time.
Two later methods for creosoting wood were introduced after the turn of the century, referred to as empty-cell processes, because they involve compressing the air inside the wood so that the preservative can only coat the inner cell walls rather than saturating the interior cell voids. This is a less effective, though usually satisfactory, method of treating the wood, but is used because it requires less of the creosoting material. The first method, the "Rüping process" was patented in 1902, and the second, the "Lowry process" was patented in 1906. Later in 1906, the "Allardyce process" and "Card process" were patented to treat wood with a combination of both creosote and zinc chloride. In 1912, it was estimated that a total of 150,000,000 gallons were produced in the US per year.