Wealth against commonwealth

by Henry Demarest Lloyd

At this writing there is an old man named Samuel Van Syckel, over eighty years of age, partly paralyzed, but still vigorous, living in an obscure back street of Buffalo, very poor, though his fertile brain has helped to make millionaires of many others. Van Syckel's life has been one of ups and downs, possible only in the case of an adventurous mind seeking the golden-fleece in a new industry and in a new country. Of all the brave and ingenious men who have experimented, invented, and pioneered to realize for mankind all the surpassing possibilities of the coming oil age, he is one of the most notable. He had already made and lost one or two fortunes when we find him, about 1860, with a little still in Jersey City, making roof-tar.

He was born in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, the son of a farmer, and worked on the farm until he was of age, when he went into business. The panic of 1857 caught him with sails wing-a-wing, conducting all at once, and prosperously, grist-mills, linseed-oil mills, grain distilleries—these he had to take for a debt—several stores, cooper-shops, and two or three farms.

He failed because he had gone security for others, but he paid 100 cents on the dollar, and went to New York City. There he became a member of the Corn Exchange, and opened a commission-house for the sale of produce. His country friends had such confidence in his honesty and judgment that within six months he had done a business of $400,000. But he discovered that of the 1500 members of the Exchange all but one had failed, and many of them several times. He saw that he was in a position where, through the inability of some other dealer to fulfil his contract, he might be swamped any day, and lose all he had himself and all the thousands intrusted to him by his friends. He had old-fashioned notions about losing friends' money, to himself or to any one else. He left the produce business. He went to making roof-tar in Jersey City, and in 1860 built one of the first refineries for making kerosene out of petroleum. When "Colonel" Drake, in 1859, found out that oil could be got by drilling, Van Syckel was one of those the new source of supply found waiting for it. He began refining in a small way, and, with an ardor which he has carried into everything he has done, he plunged into the study of new ways of refining the oil which then started to flow with embarrassing riches out of thousands of wells. The study of oil-refining became his passion, as, fortunately for us less gifted folk, the study of the effects of heat on clay, of sulphur on the gum of the caoutchouc-tree, of steam on the lid of the teakettle, were in their time passions with Palissy, Goodyear, and Watts. In the work of his life, forcing its secrets out of this difficult liquid, he has been very successful. Earthly reward the old inventor has none, but, sitting in his story-and-a-half cottage, what he mourns most is that he has been and is denied the opportunity of work. Tortured by restless and inventive energy, which age and disappointment and betrayal have not sufficed to snuff out, his continuous word is: "I want to make oil."

When petroleum from the new wells began to come to New York, dozens of little stills were built all over the Jersey flats, many of them by Jews and Greeks. "Stills kept burning up all around," he says to his visitor. "Almost every day there was an explosion somewhere from the gases. I told my wife to give me my oldest clothes and send me my meals. I was going to find out all about this business. There was a pile of roofing-gravel under a shed by my stills. I went there and slept and ate, day and night, and watched the stills and the pipes, the gases, the oils, and all. All the sleep and rest I had for months was there. It was while watching these work that my greatest idea came to me, of making oil by a continuous process, so that I could feed in petroleum at one end and have kerosene running out at the other in an unceasing stream, day after day, without stopping the whole establishment, as the oil-refineries still do, every day or two, to cool off and clean up. By the old process, still in use, when the charge in the still of perhaps 1000 barrels had been refined, we had to draw the fires and wait perhaps ten hours—the best part of a day—for the still to cool off, so that the men could go in with iron chisels to chop it all loose and clean it out. This would take four or five men from four to six hours. The still would be idle for a day and a half, and then the same process would have to be gone through with again with every charge. All over the flats the Jews and Greeks kept burning up. The Common Council of Jersey City said we must stop refining. The rest joined a great combination to fight the Common Council, but I made up my mind to go where the oil was produced. I went to Titusville in 1865. I had all the money I could want. Some rich men told me to draw on them up to $100,000 for anything there was 'snacks in' for them."

This was about the time the founders of the oil combination began in Cleveland, with "no money."

"What makes I found in Titusville!" continued Van Syckel. "I went all up and down the creek. They were glad to get 65 gallons of kerosene out of 100 gallons of petroleum, while I could get 80. I think the head of the oil combination had a little still cocked up in the woods there—a one-horse, pig-pen kind of a place at the bend of the creek, a cobbled-up sort of a mud-hole, with a water-trough to bring the oil to the still. He was not there himself; he stayed in Cleveland. I didn't ever think anything about him then. I was 'way above him. I first saw him some years after, about 1872, in a refiner's office. He was talking up some scheme he had for a combination of refineries. He said he didn't want to have the market overstocked. He was just a common-looking kind of a man among the rest of us there. I saw, when I reached Titusville, that the most money was to be made in shipping oil. I made a dollar a barrel, and in six months I was $100,000 in pocket. The land speculation I wouldn't touch. It was wild. It scared me to see men sitting around on logs, and trading off little pieces of land for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was the first man to lay a pipe line to carry oil up and down the hills of Pennsylvania."

"The first successful pipe line," says the United States Census Report of 1885, "was put down by Samuel Van Syckel, of Titusville, in 1865, and extended from Pithole to Miller's Farm, a distance of four miles."[342]

"When I first came to the oil country all the oil had to be teamed from the wells to the railways, over roads with no bottom in wet weather. Sometimes a line of teams a mile long would be stuck in the mud. Often the teamsters would dump their load, worth $5 a barrel, and abandon it. Mules would get so discouraged that they would lie down and die in the roadway before they could be helped. The teamsters knew their power. They charged accordingly. They charged for looking at the oil to see how many barrels their teams could draw. They charged extra for every mud-hole they struck, and if the wagon-wheels went to the hubs they doubled their bills. I paid $2 to $4 a barrel for teaming, and was shipping 4000 barrels a week. The teamsters were making more money than the well-owners, and didn't care whether they hauled oil or not. All this set me to thinking. I hit on the pipe line idea, and announced that I would carry the oil by pipe from the wells to the railroad. That was too much for the people of the oil regions. Everybody laughed me down. Even my particular friends, with whom I used to take my meals at the hotel, jeered and gibed me so that I took to coming and going through the back door and through the kitchen, and ate by myself. 'Do you expect to put a girdle around the earth?' was the favorite sarcasm. I knew it would cost a great deal—$100,000 perhaps; but I had the money. I built it—two two-inch lines, side by side—between June and November in 1865, and turned the oil in. The pipe was a perfect success from the first barrel of oil that was pumped in. It flowed, just as I expected, up hill and down dale. The line was four miles long—from the Miller Farm to Pithole—with two or three branches.

"Then the teamsters threatened to kill any one who worked on the pipe line or who used it. They would drive astraddle of it, dig down to it, put logging chains around it and pull it out of the ground, and leave the oil, worth $4 to $5 a barrel, running to waste out of the holes. I sent to New York for some carbines, hired 25 men to patrol the line, and put a stop to that. I put up the line as security for some debts owed by my partner, under an agreement that when its profits had paid the debt it was to be returned to me. The debt was wiped out in a few months, but I never got the line back.... I had no money left to sue for it. This was the end of my pipe line. It has grown into a system thousands of miles long, second in importance only to the railroad, and out of it many, many millions of profit have been made, but not a cent has it yielded me. Then I went to refining oil, and, with a partner, built one of the first big refineries in the oil regions. There has been no oil refined in this country since 1870 without the help of my improvements. Some I patented, some I did not. The refiners at Titusville were hard put to it for pure water. I drove pipes through the river into the second gravel under the river, and got the finest cold water there could be. This anticipated the 'driven wells' several years. I put steam into the stills" (this had been done before both by European and American refiners). "I found out how to burn the uncondensable gases. I showed one of my neighbors how to do this, and he saved $20 a day after that in his coal bills, but I got nothing for it. Each new thing I proposed, up would go everybody's hands and eyes, and oh, what a rumbling there would be! I never made money so fast as in this refinery. We did not use the continuous process. I had not patented it, and I had partners whom it would not have been right for me to experiment with. Our profits were over a dollar on every barrel. We sold our product as fast as we could make it. We made $125,000 in fifteen months, although we paid as high as $8 a barrel for crude. I worked like a slave to make good the loss of $100,000 in my pipe line. I worked and watched day and night, and knew I was beating them all making oil. My partners were church elders, who could never find words enough to express their indignation about the way my pipe line had been taken away from me, and so virtuous that they never smoked a cigar nor drank a drop. I got into no end of lawsuits with them, and I lost my property again. I sold a part interest in my patent to some one who was afterwards taken into this oil combination, and it now claims that they own all my patents. They have frightened off or bought off every one who has tried to use any of my inventions."

The rest of the old man's story was told by him under oath in a suit he brought against members of the combination.[343] "The idea of continuous distillation, as it was suggested to me at Jersey City, was always in my brain ever since. I made an attempt to construct such works in 1876 under Mr. Cary. I run out of money. I had been robbed out of my pipe line that cost me $100,000, and my oil-refinery in which I had more than $100,000. Mr. Cary said he was going to build a little refinery. He said he had $10,000 that we might use in making oil in a continuous way. We got our lease and broke ground in 1876. We had not got very far—we got the pipe on the ground and some brick and one old-fashioned still—when" the representative of the oil combination, one of its principal members, "came on to the ground ... the 15th of December, 1876. He asked me if I would not take a salary and not build these works in opposition to them. I told him 'No.' Then he wanted I should take a life salary, one that would support me for life comfortably. I told him I did not want his salary; I wanted to build this refinery and make oil in a new continuous way. He then wanted me to let him build it. He said, 'We will build it for you.' I objected to this. He then said that I could make no money if I did refine oil. He also said if I did I could not ship it. He said he would say to me confidentially that they had made such arrangements with the railroads in reference to freight—in reference to getting cars—he knew I could make no money if I did make oil."