The History of the Standard Oil CompanyTarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
History
The History of the Standard Oil Company
Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
Petroleum industry and trade -- United States -- History; Standard Oil Company -- History
Mr. Wright found some twenty refineries between Titusville and Oil City
the year of his visit, 1865. In several factories that he visited they
were making naphtha, gasoline, and benzine for export. Three grades of
illuminating oils—“prime white,” “standard white,” and “straw
colour”—were made everywhere; paraffine, refined to a pure white article
like that of to-day, was manufactured in quantities by the Downer works;
and lubricating oils were beginning to be made.
As men and means were found to put down wells, to devise and build tanks
and boats and pipes and railroads for handling the oil, to adapt and
improve processes for manufacturing, so men were found from the
beginning of the oil business to wrestle with every problem raised. They
came in shoals, young, vigorous, resourceful, indifferent to
difficulties, greedy for a chance, and with each year they forced more
light and wealth from the new product. By the opening of 1872 they had
produced nearly 40,000,000 barrels of oil, and had raised their product
to the fourth place among the exports of the United States, over
152,000,000 gallons going abroad in 1871, a percentage of the production
which compares well with what goes to-day.[3] As for the market, they
had developed it until it included almost every country of the
earth—China, the East and West Indies, South America and Africa. Over
forty different European ports received refined oil from the United
States in 1871. Nearly a million gallons were sent to Syria, about a
half million to Egypt, about as much to the British West Indies, and a
quarter of a million to the Dutch East Indies. Not only were
illuminating oils being exported. In 1871 nearly seven million gallons
of naphtha, benzine, and gasoline were sent abroad, and it became
evident now for the first time that a valuable trade in lubricants made
from petroleum was possible. A discovery by Joshua Merrill of the Downer
works opened this new source of wealth to the industry. Until 1869 the
impossibility of deodorising petroleum had prevented its use largely as
a lubricant, but in that year Mr. Merrill discovered a process by which
a deodorised lubricating oil could be made. He had both the apparatus
for producing the oil and the oil itself patented. The oil was so
favourably received that the market sale by the Downer works was several
hundred per cent. greater in a single year than the firm had ever sold
before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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