And here is a nice point in combination. Not far away from the canning works, on Newtown Creek, is an oil refinery. This oil runs to the canning works, and, as the new-made cans come down by a chute from the works above, where they have just been finished, they are filled, twelve at a time, with the oil made a few miles away. The filling apparatus is admirable. As the new-made cans come down the chute they are distributed, twelve in a row, along one side of a turn-table. The turn-table is revolved, and the cans come directly under twelve measures, each holding five gallons of oil—a turn of a valve, and the cans are full. The table is turned a quarter, and while twelve more cans are filled and twelve fresh ones are distributed, four men with soldering coppers put the caps on the first set. Another quarter turn, and men stand ready to take the cans from the filler, and while they do this, twelve more are having caps put on, twelve are filling, and twelve are coming to their place from the chute. The cans are placed at once in wooden boxes standing ready, and, after a twenty-four-hour wait for discovering leaks, are nailed up and carted to a near-by door. This door opens on the river, and there at anchor by the side of the factory is a vessel chartered for South America or China or where not—waiting to receive the cans which a little more than twenty-four hours before were tin sheets lying in flat boxes. It is a marvellous example of economy not only in materials, but in time and in footsteps.
With Mr. Rockefeller’s genius for detail, there went a sense of the big and vital factors in the oil business, and a daring in laying hold of them which was very like military genius. He saw strategic points like a Napoleon, and he swooped on them with the suddenness of a Napoleon. This master ability has been fully illustrated already in this work. Mr. Rockefeller’s capture of the Cleveland refineries in 1872 was as dazzling an achievement as it was a hateful one. The campaign by which the Empire Transportation Company was wrested from the Pennsylvania Railroad, viewed simply as a piece of brigandage, was admirable. The man saw what was necessary to his purpose, and he never hesitated before it. His courage was steady—and his faith in his ideas unwavering. He simply knew that was the thing to do, and he went ahead with the serenity of the man who knows.
After the formation of the trust the demand for these qualities was constant. For instance, the contract which the Standard signed with the producers in February, 1880, pledged them to take care of a production of 65,000 barrels a day. When they signed this agreement there was above ground nearly nine and one-half million barrels of oil. The production increased at a frightful rate for four years. At the end of 1880 there were stocks of over 17,000,000 above ground; in 1881, over 25,000,000; 1882, over 34,000,000; 1883, over 35,000,000; and 1884, over 36,000,000, and the United Pipe Lines took care of this production—with the aid of the producers, who built tanks neck and neck with them. In 1880 the Standard people averaged over one iron tank a day, the tanks holding from 25,000 to 35,000 barrels. There were not tank-builders enough in the United States to do the work, and crews were brought from Canada and England. This, of course, called for an enormous expenditure of money, for tanks cost from $7,000 to $10,000 apiece. Rich as the United Pipe Lines were they were forced to borrow money in these years of excessive production, for they had to lay lines as well as build tanks. There were nearly 4,000 miles of pipe-line laid in the Bradford region alone from 1878 to 1884, and these lines connected with upward of 20,000 wells.
From the time it completed its pipe-line monopoly the Standard has followed oil wherever found. It has had to do it to keep its hold on the business, and its courage never yet has faltered, though it has demanded some extraordinary efforts. In 1891 a great deposit of oil was tapped in the McDonald field of Southwestern Pennsylvania. The monthly production increased from 50,000 barrels in June to 1,600,000 in December. It is an actual fact that in the McDonald field the United Pipe Lines increased the daily capacity of 3,500 barrels, which they had at the beginning of July, to one of 26,000 barrels by the first of September, and by the first of December they could handle 90,000 barrels a day. If one considers what this means one sees that it compares favourably with the great ordnance and mobilising feats of the Civil War. To accomplish it, rolling mills and boiler shops in various cities worked night and day to turn out the pipe, the pumps, the engines, the boilers which were needed. Transportation had to be arranged, crews of men obtained, a wild country prepared, sawmills to cut the quantities of timber needed built, and this vast amount of material placed and set to work.
The same audacity and effectiveness are shown by the Standard in attacking situations created by new developments in handling business. The seaboard pipe-line is a notable example. When the Standard completed its pipe-line monopoly at the end of 1877, the pipe-line was still regarded as the feeder of the railroad. Naturally the railroads were seriously opposed to its becoming anything more. In Pennsylvania particularly the laws had been so manipulated by the Pennsylvania Railroad as to prevent the pipe-line carrying oil even for short distances in competition with them. Now, for many years it had been believed that the pipe-line could carry oil long distances—many claimed to the seaboard—and as soon as the independents found that the oil-bearing roads were acting solely in the interest of the Standard they began an agitation for a seaboard line which finally terminated in the Tidewater Line, one hundred and four miles long, carrying oil from the Bradford field to Williamsport on the Reading Railroad, and it was certain that the Tidewater eventually would get to the seaboard. That the day of the railroad as a carrier of crude oil was over when the Tidewater began to pump oil was obvious both to Mr. Rockefeller and to the railroad presidents, and without hesitation he seized the idea. By 1883 the Standard was pumping oil to New York, and the railroads that had served so effectively in building up the trust were practically out of the crude business. It was this audacious and splendid stroke, practically freeing him from the railroads which had made him, which made the passage of the Interstate Commerce Bill a matter of comparatively small importance to Mr. Rockefeller. To be sure, he still needed the railroads for refined, but he could so place his refineries that this service would be greatly minimised. The legislation which the Oil Regions of Pennsylvania demanded for fifteen years in hope of securing an equal chance in transportation came too late. By the time the bill was passed the pipe had replaced the rail as the great oil carrier, and the pipes were not merely under Mr. Rockefeller’s control, as the rails had been; they belonged to him. It was little wonder, then, that the passage of the great bill did not ruffle his serenity. Little wonder that the Oil Regions, realising the situation, so tragic in its irony, as fully as Mr. Rockefeller did, felt an exasperation almost uncontrolled over it. Yet the seaboard pipe-line was no development of the Standard Oil Company. The idea had been conceived and the practicability demonstrated by others, but it was seized by the Standard as soon as it proved possible. This quick sense of the real value of new developments, and this alertness in seizing them, have been among the strongest elements in the Standard’s success.
And every new line of action was developed to its utmost. Take the work the Standard began in 1879 on the foreign market. Before the Standard Oil Company was known, save as one of several prosperous Cleveland refineries, the foreign trade had been developed until petroleum was fourth in our list of exports, and it went literally to every civilised country on the globe. In 1874 Colonel Forney made a trip through the Orient, and he wrote in one of his letters that he found both Babylon and Nineveh to be lighted with American petroleum, and that while he was in Damascus a census was taken to ascertain how much petroleum was needed for each house in the place, and a proposition was made for its entire use. “At present,” said the Derrick, in commenting on this letter, “petroleum is the chief commercial representative of the United States in the Levant and the Orient.”
The same dithyrambic paragraphs were written by oil men then, as by the Standard now, concerning foreign trade. For instance, compare the two paragraphs below—the one found in 1874 in the Derrick, the second in a defence of the Oil Trust published in 1900:
1874—“It lights the dwellings, the temples, and the mosques amid the ruins of ancient Babylon and Nineveh; it is the light of Bagdad, the city of the Thousand and One Nights; of Orfa, birthplace of Abraham; of Mardeen, the ancient Macius of the Romans, and of Damascus, gem of the Orient. It burns in the grotto of the Nativity at Bethlehem; in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; amidst the Pyramids of Egypt; on the Acropolis of Athens; on the plains of Troy; and in cottage and palace on the banks of the Bosporus and the Golden Horn.”
1900—“Petroleum to-day is the light of the world. It is carried wherever a wheel can roll or a camel’s hoof be planted. The caravans on the desert of Sahara go laden with Pratt’s Astral, and elephants in India carry cases of ‘Standard-white,’ while ships are constantly loading at our wharves for Japan, Java and the most distant isles of the sea.”
Exports grew rapidly through the same machinery which had created the foreign market. In 1870 there were something over one hundred and forty million gallons of petroleum products going abroad, in 1873 nearly two and one-half hundred million, in 1878 three and one-half hundred million. In 1870 the Standard began its work on the foreign trade by sending a representative abroad. Country after country seems to have been taken up, the idea being that the daily Standard Oil meeting should have the same full information before it concerning every place of foreign trade as it had of the American trade, and that gradually the company should control the foreign trade as it did the American industry, doing away with middlemen, “paying nobody a profit.” This work, begun in 1879, has been carried on steadily ever since. Through it the Standard soon became largely its own exporter. It established stations of its own in one port after another of Europe, Asia, South America, and has built up a large oil fleet. It carried on an aggressive campaign for developing markets; it looked after hostile legislation; it studied the possible competition of native oils; it met every difficulty—prejudice, ignorance, poverty. Little by little it has done in foreign countries what it has done in the United States. To-day it even carts oil from door to door in Germany and Portugal and other countries, as it does in America, thus realising Mr. Rockefeller’s vision of controlling the petroleum of America from the time it leaves the ground until it is put into the lamp of the consumer.
The same economy and alertness were applied to the matter of making oils. In laying hands on the refineries of the country, Rockefeller had acquired by 1882 about all the processes of manufacturing known, both patented and free. These processes, including all the essential ones of to-day, had been developed entirely outside of the Standard Oil Company. As early as 1865, the year Mr. Rockefeller went into the business, William Wright wrote an exhaustive book on the Oil Regions of Pennsylvania. Among other things, he reported quite fully what was being done in the refining of petroleum. He found that in several factories they were making naphtha, gasoline and benzine; that three grades of illuminating oils—“prime white,” “standard white” and “straw colour”—were made everywhere; that paraffine, refined to a pure white article like that of to-day, was manufactured in quantities by the Downer works; and that lubricating oils were beginning to be made.