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product called by the made-up name of “kerosene” and known as the “new light,
Gasoline was then only an almost useless by-product, which sometimes managed to be sold for as much as two cents a gallon, and, when it could not be sold at all, was run out into rivers at
one historian put it, was nothing less than “a turning point in the establishment of the petroleum business.
Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company.
Dr. Abraham Gesner.
European crude production in 1859 had been estimated at thirty-six thousand barrels, primarily from Galicia and Rumania.
Bissell did indeed become very wealthy. And, among his many philanthropies, he donated the money for a gymnasium to Dartmouth,
A parcel of land in Pithole that sold for $2 million in 1865 was auctioned for $4.37 in 1878.
“the Great
He kept an old suit that he would wear whenever he went out to the Oil Regions to tramp around in the muddy fields, buying oil.
with the partial exception of the Tidewater, Standard controlled almost every inch of pipeline into and out of the Oil
producers from the Oil Regions launched a series of legal assaults in Pennsylvania against discriminatory rates. They denounced “the overweening control of the oil business by the Standard Oil Company,
The charges against Standard were brought together for the first time by Henry Demarest Lloyd, in a series of editorials for the Chicago Tribune, and then in an article entitled “The Story of a Great Monopoly,” which was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1881.
In 1885, the trust itself moved into new headquarters, a nine-story office building at 26 Broadway, in lower Manhattan,
“These men are smarter than I am a great deal,” William Vanderbilt of the New York Central Railroad told the New York State Legislature. “They are very enterprising and smart men. I never came into contact with any class of men so smart and able as they are in their
He was analytical and suspicious, and he kept his distance from people.
“All the fortune that I have made has not served to compensate me for the anxiety of that period,
“Kerosene has, in one sense, increased the length of life among the agricultural population,” he wrote. “Those who, on account of the dearness or inefficiency of whale oil, were accustomed to go to bed soon after the sunset and spend almost half their time in sleep, now occupy a portion of the night in reading and other amusements; and this is more particularly true of the winter seasons.
Herman Frasch, a German chemist employed by Standard, figured out that, if the crude oil were refined in the presence of copper oxide, the sulfur could be removed, eliminating the problem of the rotten-eggs smell and thus making Lima oil an acceptable source of kerosene.
By 1891, though virtually absent from production a few years earlier, Standard was itself responsible for a quarter of America’s total output of crude
the Joseph Seep Agency, the buying arm of Standard Oil, bought oil on the open market like everyone else, by acquiring “certificates” on these exchanges.
While Ludwig Nobel’s patience and determination did not abate in the face of the never-ending obstacles, physically he was worn out. In 1888 at the age of fifty-seven, the Oil King of Baku died of a heart attack while vacationing on the French Riviera. Some of the European newspapers confused the Nobel brothers and instead reported the death of Alfred. Reading his own premature obituaries, Alfred was distressed to find himself condemned as a munitions maker, the “dynamite king,” a merchant of death who had made a huge fortune by finding new ways to maim and kill. He brooded over these
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Murex
Crown Oil, and in so doing, it was opening up the world’s third major producing province. It was called Royal
Ahead, he could see vindication of the labors of ten years. “What won’t bend must break,” he wrote in a letter. “Throughout the entire exploration, my motto was: whoever is not with me is against me, and I shall treat him accordingly. I know well enough that this motto earns me enemies, but I know also that had I not acted as I did, I should never have accomplished the business.” Those words might well have stood as the epitaph of Aeilko Jans Zijlker.
“Dutch obstacles are about the most difficult in the World for Americans to remove,” a Standard Oil official declared, “for Americans are always in a hurry and Dutchmen never.
The new technology of electricity was quickly transferred to Europe as well. An electric light system was installed in the Holborn Viaduct Station in London in 1882. So swiftly and so thoroughly did electricity—and the electrical industries—penetrate Berlin that the city was called Elektropolis.
in 1899, the owners of the Standard Oil Interests established Standard Oil of New Jersey as the holding company for their entire operation.
Rogers took over the financing of the education of the blind and deaf Helen Keller, enabling her to go to Radcliffe.
Altogether, Tarbell’s series ran for twenty-four successive months, and was then published in November 1904 in book form as. The History of Standard Oil Company
Afterward, the neighbor described Rockefeller’s attitude as that “of a game fighter who expects to be whacked on the head once in a while. He is not the least disturbed by any blows he may receive. He maintains that Standard has done more good than harm.” On other occasions, Rockefeller was overheard to use a pet name for his “lady friend”—“Miss Tar Barrel.
Roosevelt steadfastly kept to them in his own private letters. It was he who first used the term “muckraker” to describe the journalists of the progressive movement. He meant it derisively, for he felt that their attacks against politicians and corporations were too negative and too focused on the “vile and debasing.” He feared that their writings would fuel the flames of revolution and push people toward socialism or anarchism.
how exactly was this vast, interconnected empire to be broken up? The scale was simply enormous. The company transported more than four-fifths of all oil produced in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. It refined more than three-fourths of all United States crude oil; it owned more than half of all tank cars; it marketed more than four-fifths of all domestic kerosene and was responsible for more than four-fifths of all kerosene exported; it sold to the railroads more than nine-tenths of all their lubricating oils. It also sold a vast array of by-products—including 300 million candles of seven
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In 1910, gasoline sales had exceeded kerosene for the first time, and demand was galloping ahead.
ostatki, as the waste residue from kerosene refining was called in Russia,
Perlak -- royal dutch
Henri Wilhelm August Deterding
“You will go a long way in business if you train yourself to be able to appraise figures almost as rapidly and as shrewdly as a good judge of character can sum up his fellow-men.
In order to manage the new company, Deterding took up residence in London (though since 1897 he had been using a London cable
Lane launched into a bitter critique of the way Marcus Samuel ran his company. “You are, and have always been, too much occupied to be at the head of such a business,” he wrote. “There seems only one idea: sink capital, create a great bluster, and trust to providence. Such a happy-go-lucky frame of mind in business I have never seen before. … Business like this cannot be conducted by an occasional glance in one’s spare time, or by some brilliant coup from time to time. It is steady, treadmill work.” Unless “some very radical change is made,” Lane prophesied, “the bubble will burst” and then
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“If the Standard had tried three years ago to wipe us out, they’d have succeeded,” Deterding said in 1910, but proudly added, “Now things are different.
Baku became the “revolutionary hotbed on the Caspian.” Hidden away deep in the heart of its Tatar quarter was a large cellar that stretched under several buildings. Here was the home of “Nina”—the name given to the secret, large printing operation into which the mats of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s revolutionary paper, Iskra, were smuggled, from Europe via Persia, to be printed for circulation within the country.
Between 1904 and 1913, Russia’s share of world petroleum exports dropped from 31 to 9 percent.
William Knox D
In 1872, and again in 1889, Baron Julius de Reuter, founder of the Reuters news agency, had obtained Persian concessions that provided, among other things, for the development of oil.
Thomas Boverton Redwood, “the éminence grise of British oil policy before the First World War,” and a man who had a profound influence on the course of international oil developments in the first two decades of this century.
Louis Dane.
George Reynolds was the man who held the whole thing together. Already around fifty when he first arrived in Persia in September of 1901, he would proceed to carry out an unusually difficult enterprise under endlessly trying circumstances. He was at one and the same time engineer, geologist, manager, field representative, diplomat, linguist, and anthropologist. In addition, he had a most valuable knack for jerry-rigging machinery when parts broke or were simply missing. He was taciturn, tough, and tenacious.
Charles Greenway was the man who really fashioned the company. It was as manager of a Scottish trading house in Bombay that he had first begun to deal in oil. The Scottish merchants associated with Burmah Oil asked him to assist in the beginning stages of Anglo-Persian, and within a year he was its managing director. He dominated the company for the next two decades. When he started, he was virtually a one-man band; by the time of his retirement, he presided over an integrated oil company, actively engaged throughout the world. Later in life, he became known as “Champagne Charlie” and was
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His view, and that of his senior officials in India, was that it was altogether unwise to become dependent upon a most insecure foreign source of oil when Britain was blessed with an abundance of secure coal. As the Secretary of State for India declared, “It is rather as though the owners of the premier cru vineyards in the Gironde went about preaching the virtues of Scotch whisky as a beverage.
