AN OIL KING'S START.
Massachusetts Newsboy Gets an Attack
of Wanderlust and Finds Fortune in
Pennsylvania Wells.
H.H. Rogers, future master builder of industrial organizations, did odd chores for the neighbors, in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, when a boy, and earned on the average fifty cents a week. His first step in real business was when he established a news route of forty-seven subscribers for the New Bedford Standard. In one week he doubled the number and struck for seventy-five cents more a week than the seventy-five cents he was receiving. This was granted and he also got an increased commission on new subscribers. A few months in a grocery store completed his Fairhaven business experience, and then, with Charles Ellis, a schoolfellow, he went to the Pennsylvania oil fields to make his fortune. Each had about two hundred dollars and they started in the refining business. It did not go the way Rogers wished, so he said to Ellis:
"Look here, I am going to learn the oil business. You run the office."
Rogers put on overalls and went to work at the pumps and stills. He was there early and late, working at everything, investigating, getting a grip on every detail, learning how the business could be run on the most economical basis and at the same time give the best quality of product. When he returned to office work the organization of the Standard Oil was under way. It was the knowledge he had gained at the stills that enabled him to figure down the cost of production to the fraction of a cent. It was he, also, who was the leading factor in the elimination of competition.