The first trust to arouse public notice was concerned in the transportation and manufacture of petroleum and its products. Commercial processes for refining petroleum became available in the sixties, enabling improvements in domestic illumination that insured an increasing market for the product. The industry was speculative by nature because of the low cost of crude petroleum at the well and the high cost of delivering it to the consumer. Slight rises in price caused the market to be swamped by overproduction, and threw the control of the industry into the hands of those who controlled its transportation. Once above ground, the cheap and bulky oil had to be hauled first to the refiner and then to the consumer. The receptacles were expensive, and the methods of transportation that were cheapest in operation had the greatest initial cost. Barrels were relatively cheap to buy, but were costly to handle. Tank-cars were more expensive, but repaid those who could afford them. Pipe-lines were beyond the means of the individual, but brought in greater returns to the corporations that owned them. It was inevitable that some of the dealers who competed in the oil-fields of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia in the sixties should realize the strategic value of the control of transportation and profit by it. John D. Rockefeller happened to be more successful than others in manipulating transportation. His refineries grew in size, as they bought out or crushed their rivals, until by 1882 most of the traffic in petroleum was under his control. Economy and sagacity had much to do with the success, but were less significant than transportation. Railway rates were yet unfixed by law and every road sold transportation as best it could. Rockefeller learned to bargain in freight rates, and through a system of special rates and rebates gained advantages over every competitor. His lobby made it difficult to weaken him through legislative measures, while his attorneys were generally more skillful than his prosecutors before the courts. The recognition of the existence of rebates did much to hasten the passage of the Interstate Commerce Law. The group of corporations that flourished because of them became the greatest of the trusts. By 1882 the affiliated Rockefeller companies were so numerous and complicated that they were given into the hands of a group of trustees to be managed as a single business. The Whiskey and Sugar Trusts, formed in 1887, had to do with commodities in which transportation was not the controlling element. These industries suffered from overproduction and ruinous competition, to eliminate which the distilleries and sugar refineries entered into trust agreements like that of the Standard Oil companies. Other lines of manufacture followed as best they could. Before Cleveland was inaugurated the trend was noticed and attacked.