The World: A Family History of Humanity

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Gilded Age was coal-fuelled and steam-powered, but an angular and meticulous young man was investing in another carbon fuel that seemed useful only for illumination. In fact it would change the world. On 10 January 1870, the thirty-one-year-old John D. Rockefeller founded an oil refinery in Cleveland, Ohio, that he called Standard Oil. At the end of the civil war, he had started to buy out other oil refiners. Rockefeller’s ascetic nature, manifested in an obsession with order and tidiness, was a reaction against a father who was an itinerant huckster, bigamist and snake-oil salesman. Houses had long been lit by whale oil, extracted by whalers, but in 1857 oil was discovered seeping out of the ground in Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, starting a switch to Rockefeller’s chief product, kerosene, now used to light private houses and the streets of the growing cities. Rockefeller played what he called his ‘great game’, an aggressive integration of the oil business into one ‘trust’ that controlled everything from the gushing oil via ships and refineries to the customers who bought their kerosene tins from the local store. The by-products of refining oil were useful for making lubricants for machinery, skin products and something called gasoline, but it was not lucrative. There seemed no use for it.