Few persons have any conception of the labor and capital involved in storing and transporting petroleum. Only those familiar with the early methods can appreciate fully the convenience and economy of the pipe-line system. It puts the producer in direct communication with the carrier and a market at all seasons, regardless of high or low water, rain or storm, mud or dust. The tanks at his wells are connected with the pipe-line by one or more of the two-inch feeders that spider-web the producing-country. Small pumps force the crude, when the location of the well prevents running it by gravity, from these tanks into a receiving-tank of the line, whence it can be piped into the trunk-lines or a storage-tank as desired. The producer who wishes his oil run notifies the nearest office or agent of the company—usually this requires about two minutes by wire—a gauger measures the feet and inches of fluid in the tank, opens the stop-cock, turns the stream into the line and, presto, change! the job is done. The gauger measures the oil left at the bottom of the tank, gives the producer a receipt for the difference between the two gauges and reports the result to the central station of that section of the field. There tables of the measurements of every tank in the locality are at hand, properly labeled and numbered. The right table shows at a glance the amount of oil in barrels corresponding to the feet and inches the gauger reports having run and the producer is credited accordingly, just like a depositor in a bank. These reports are summed up at a certain hour and the company learns precisely how much oil has been received each day. By a similar process the shipments are recorded and the exact quantity in the custody of the company is known at the close of the day’s business. Runs and shipments are published daily and a monthly synopsis is posted, in compliance with the laws of Pennsylvania. The producer can leave his oil in the line, subject to a slight charge for storage after thirty days, or sell it immediately. He can take certificates or acceptances of one thousand barrels each, payable on demand in crude-oil at any shipping-point in the oil-region. These certificates, good as gold and negotiable as certified checks, the holder can use as collateral to borrow money, sell at sight or stow away if he looks for an advance in prices. It is not Hobson’s choice with him. In an hour from the time of notifying the office his oil may be run, the amount figured up, the sale made and the currency in the owner’s pocket. He has not tugged and perspired loading it in wagons or on cars, worn out his patience and his team and his profanity driving it through an ocean of mud, or risked the chances of a jam and a wreck ferrying it on the bosom of a pond-freshet. Nor has he put up one penny for the service of the pipe-line, which collects twenty cents a barrel when the oil is delivered to the purchaser. The company is not a holder of oil on its own account, except what it necessarily keeps to offset evaporation and sediment, acting merely as a common-carrier between the producer and the refiner. The system is the perfection of simplicity, accuracy and cheapness.
Pipe-lines are the natural outgrowth of the petroleum-business, which could no more get along without them than could the commerce of the world without railroads and steamships. The movement of a thousand barrels of crude in early times was a task of great magnitude, costly, time-consuming and perplexing. Sometimes barrels were not to be had, the water was too shallow for boating or the mud too deep for teaming. Often a big well wasted half its product and gorged transportation, harassing the soul and depleting the purse of the luckless owner. Fancy attempting to handle a hundred-thousand barrels a day with the primitive appliances! Whew! You might as well try to cart off Niagara in kegs. Butler and McKean rushed wells by the hundred every week, swelling the production extravagantly. The supply was enormously in excess of the demand. Operators wouldn’t stop drilling and the surplus oil had to be cared for in some way. The United Lines and the National-Transit Company spent millions of dollars to provide adequate facilities. Not only was the vast output to be taken from the wells, but a large percentage must be stored. To pipe a hundred-and-forty-thousand barrels a day was a grand achievement, even without the burden of husbanding much of the stuff for weeks, months and years. A wilderness of iron-tanks—thirty to forty thousand barrels each—went up at Olean, Oil City, Raymilton, Parker and distributing points. Stocks increased and tanks multiplied until forty-million barrels were piled up! Think of the mountains of pipe, the acres of iron-plates, the legions of workmen and the stacks of cash all this required. Six pipes were laid to New York and the Tidewater Company built a six-inch line to New Jersey. The trunk-lines of the National-Transit alone are five-thousand miles in length, besides which the Tidewater and the United-States pipe oil eastward. Fifty-thousand barrels of crude a day flow through these underground arteries to the refineries at Hunter’s Point, Bayonne and Philadelphia. Other thousands are piped to Baltimore, Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburg and refineries in the oil-region. The pipe used in transporting crude would girdle the earth twice and leave a long string for extra-measure. Truly “these be piping times.”
McDonald gushers poured out their floods, but the National-Transit and Mellon Lines were on deck with pumps and pipes that snatched the contents of the tanks and whirled them to the sea. John McKeown’s leviathan at Washington electrified the neighborhood by starting at three-hundred barrels an hour, with only three small tanks to hold the product. It filled the first in forty minutes. Superintendent Glenn Braden set up a pump in thirty minutes more that would empty the tank in a half-hour. All night it was nip and tuck between the spouter and the pump, big Goliath and puny David. The pump won, the oil was safe in the line and not a drop spilled! West-Virginia’s geysers burst forth and the Southern Trunk-Line—three-hundred miles of eight-inch and six-inch pipe—linked Morgantown to Philadelphia. Lima tried to drown Ohio in crude and an eight-inch line quietly dumped the deluge into Chicago. Part of it fired the half-mile row of boilers at the Columbian Exposition, with not a cinder, a speck of ashes or a whiff of smoke to dim the lustrous flame of fuel-oil. Indiana, the home of some pretty big statesmen, some pretty big oil-territory and “the Hoosier Schoolmaster,” had a surfeit of crude which the pipe-lines bore to the huge refinery at Whiting, to Cleveland and the Windy City. Thus the development of new fields, remote from railroads, has been rendered possible.
Trunk-lines require pipe of extra weight, manufactured expressly for the purpose from wrought-iron, lap-welded, cut into lengths of eighteen feet and tested to a pressure of two-thousand pounds to the square inch. Pumping-stations, supplied with powerful machinery, are located at suitable points, generally twenty-five to thirty miles apart. The stations on the National-Transit trunk-lines usually comprise a boiler-house forty feet square, built of brick and roofed with corrugated iron, lighted by electricity and containing seven or eight tubular boilers of eighty to one-hundred horse-power. For greater safety from fire the immense pumps are in a separate brick-building. The largest pumps are triple-expansion crank and fly-wheel engines, the invention of John S. Klein, superintendent of the company’s machine-shops at Oil City. Each of these giants can force twenty-five-thousand barrels of oil a day through three six-inch pipes from one station to the next. A low-duty engine is run when the main-pump is stopped for repairs or any cause. At each station two or more storage-tanks—thirty to thirty-five thousand barrels apiece—are provided. One receives the oil from the preceding station while the pump is emptying the other into the receiver at the station beyond. The movement is incessant. Night and day, never tiring and never resting, the iron-arteries throb and pulsate with the greasy liquid that rushes swiftly a yard beneath the surface, duplicate machinery obviating the necessity of delay or interruption. Five or six boilers are fired at once and two are held in reserve, in case of accident. Loops are laid around some of the stations, that a pump may send the oil two or three times the average distance and the total disability of a station not blockade the line. When lofty hills are surmounted the pressure on the pump reaches twelve to fifteen-hundred pounds. Independent telegraph-lines connect the stations with one another and the main-offices. The engineers handle the key and click messages expertly. The lines are patrolled regularly to detect leaks, although the system of checking from tank to tank makes it impossible for a serious break to pass unnoticed. To clear the incrustations of paraffine, especially in cold weather, a scraper or “go-devil” is sent through the pipes. The best of these instruments—a spindle with a ball-and-socket-joint near its center to follow the bends of the pipe, fitted with steel-blades set radially and kept in position by three arms in front and rear—was devised by Mr. Klein. Oblique vanes, put in motion by the running oil, rotate the spindle and the blades scrape the pipe as the “go-devil” is propelled forward. A catch-box is placed at the end of each division and the queer traveler can be closely timed. The great battery of boilers, the huge engine-pumps—one on the Lima-Chicago line weighs a hundred tons—the electric-plants and the intricate maze of steam-pipes and water-pipes suggest the machinery of an ocean-steamship.
If the railroad is “the missionary of punctuality,” as Robert Burdette concisely expresses it, surely the pipe-line is the messenger of efficiency. With wondrous speed and unfailing certainty it conveys crude-oil from the wells to the refineries in or out of the region, climbing hills, descending ravines, fathoming rivers and traversing plains and forests. Methods of refining have kept pace with progress in transportation. The smoky, dangerous, inconvenient kettle-still of the pioneer on Oil Creek has given place to the mammoth refinery of to-day, with its labor-saving appliances, its hundreds of skilled employés and its improved processes. Instead of the ill-smelling, sputtering, explosive mixture of earlier years, the world now receives the water-white kerosene that burns as steadily and safely as a wax-taper. Seventy tank-vessels carry it over the seas to Europe, Asia and Africa. It is delivered at your house in neat cans, or the grocer will sell it by the pint, quart, gallon or barrel. The light is pure as heaven’s own sunshine, grateful to the eye and beautifying to the home. No other substance approaches petroleum in the number and utility of its products. Long years of patient research and experiment have extracted from it one-hundred-and-fifty articles of value in art, science, mechanics and domestic economy. It supplies healing-salves, ointments, cosmetics, soaps, dainty toilet-accessories and—oh, girly Vassar girls—chewing-gum! Refuse tar and scum are converted into lamp-black and coarse lubricants. Scarcely a particle of it goes to waste. Noxious gases and poisonous acids no longer pollute the air and the streams around refineries, offending human nostrils and killing helpless fish. The amazing vastness of its development is equalled only by the marvelous variety of petroleum’s commercial uses.
At every stage of its journey from the hole in the ground to the abode of the purchaser of kerosene, oil is handled with a view to the best results. The pipe-line relieves the producer from worry and fatigue and a large outlay, furnishing him prompt service and a cash market at his own door every business-day in the year. It enables the refiner to fill the consumer’s lamp at a trifling margin above the price of crude. For seventy cents a barrel—less than half it cost formerly to haul it a mile—the line collects oil from the wells, pumps it into the trunk-lines and delivers it in New York. Contrast this charge with the four, five, eight or ten dollars exacted in the days of boats and wagons, barrels and tank-cars and endeavor to figure the saving to the public wrought by the pipe-lines, to say nothing of greater convenience and expedition. The existing transportation-system may be a monopoly, but the country is hungry for more monopolies of the same sort. If it be monopoly to bring order out of chaos, to build one strong enterprise from a dozen weaklings, to consolidate into a grand corporation a score of feeble lines and reduce freight-rates seventy-five to ninety-five per cent., the National-Transit Company is the rankest monopoly of the century. It practices the kind of monopoly that converts a row of tottering shanties into a stately business-block. It is guilty of furnishing storage solid as the Rock of Gibraltar to the men who drilled oil down to forty cents a barrel and tiding them over the period of excessive production. This is the brand of monopoly that keeps industry alive, that supplies foreign nations with an American product and benefits humanity. If Van Syckle, Abbott and Harley were plucky and courageous in braving the wrath of four-thousand teamsters, how much more brain and brawn, muscle and money, dollars and sense were needed to lay trunk-lines that sent ten-thousand tank-cars to the junk-pile and diminished the revenues of railroads millions of dollars annually! The owners of these lines have grown rich, as they ought to do, because for every dollar of their winnings they have saved producers and consumers of petroleum ten.
Pipe-line certificates afforded an excellent medium for speculation. The commodity they represented was subject to fluctuations of five to fifty per cent., which made it particularly fascinating to speculators in stocks. Oil-exchanges were established at Oil City, Titusville, Parker, Bradford, Pittsburg, New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere. In a single year the clearances exceeded eleven-billion barrels. Bulls and bears reveled in excitement and brokers had customers from every quarter of the country. The forerunner of these institutions was “the Curbstone Exchange” at Oil City in 1870. The bulk of the buying and selling was done in front of Lockhart, Frew & Co.’s office, Centre street, near the railroad track. Producers, dealers and spectators would congregate on the sidewalk, discuss the situation, tell stories and buy or sell oil. The group in the illustration includes a number of well-known citizens. Most of them have left Oil City and not a few have gone from earth. Acquaintances will recognize Dr. Knox, John Mawhinney, James Mawhinney, John D. Archbold, Dr. Baldwin, A. H. Bronson, P. H. Judd, L. D. Kellogg, A. E. Fay, George Porter, Edward Higbee, William M. Williams, John W. Austin, J. M. Butters, Joseph Bates, George W. Parker, William H. Porterfield, Charles W. Frazer, Edward Simmons, Samuel H. Lamberton, James H. Magee, Isaac Lloyd and William Elliott. Charles Lockhart and William Frew were pioneer refiners at Pittsburg and heavy buyers of crude at Oil City. William G. Warden entered into partnership with them and established the great Atlantic Refinery at Point Breeze. In 1874 the refineries controlled by Warden, Frew & Co. consolidated with the Standard Oil-Company of Ohio, forming the nucleus of the Standard Oil-Trust. Mr. Warden built the Gladstone, the first large apartment-house in Philadelphia, and died in April of 1895. He married a daughter of Daniel Bushnell and was one of the most enterprising and charitable citizens of Pennsylvania. His surviving contemporaries are old in reminiscences of Oil Creek and the days when pipe-lines and oil-certificates were unguessed probabilities.
OIL CITY “CURBSTONE EXCHANGE” IN 1870.
Trades were made in offices, at wells, on streets, anywhere and everywhere. Purchasers for Pittsburg, Baltimore and Philadelphia refiners started brokerage in 1868, on a commission of ten cents a barrel from buyers and five from sellers. The Farmers’ Railroad, completed to Oil City in 1867, brought so many operators to town that a car was assigned them, in which they bought and sold “spot,” “regular” and “future oil.” There were no certificates, no written obligations, no margins to bind a bargain, but everything was done on honor and no man’s word was broken. “Spot oil” was to be moved and paid for at once, “regular” allowed the buyer ten days to put the oil on the cars and “future” was taken as agreed upon mutually. Large lots frequently changed hands in this passenger-car, really the first oil-exchange. The business increased, an exchange on wheels had manifest disadvantages and in December of 1869 it was decided to effect a permanent organization. Officers were elected and a room was rented on Centre street. It removed to the Sands Block in 1871, to the Opera-House Block in January of 1872 and to a temporary shed next the Empire-Line office in the fall, when South-Improvement complications dissolved the organization. For about fifteen months hotels, streets, or offices sufficed for accommodations. In February of 1864 the exchange was reorganized, with George V. Forman as president, and occupied quarters in the Collins House four years. Gradually rules were adopted and methods introduced that brought about the system afterwards in vogue. In April of 1878 the formal opening of the splendid Oil-Exchange Building took place. The structure contained offices, committee-rooms, telegraph-lines, reading-rooms and all conveniences for its four-hundred members. H. L. Foster, now of Chicago, was president term after term. The late H. L. McCance, secretary for years, was a first-class artist, with a skill for caricature worthy of Thomas Nast. Some of the most striking cartoons pertaining to oil were the work of his ready pencil. F. W. Mitchell & Co. inaugurated the advancing of money on certificates, their bank’s transactions in this line ranging from one to four-million dollars a day. The application of the clearing-house system in 1882 simplified the routine and facilitated deliveries. The volume of business was immense, the clearances often amounting to ten or fifteen-million barrels a day. Only the New York and the San Francisco stock-exchanges surpassed it. If speculation were piety, everybody who inhaled the air of Oil City would have been saved and the devil might have put up his shutters. During rapid fluctuations the galleries would be packed with men and women who had “taken a flyer” and watched the antics of the bulls and bears intently. Fortunes were gained and lost. Many a “lamb” was shorn and many a “duck” lamed. It was a raging fever, a delirium of excitement, compressing years of ordinary anxiety and haste into a week. Now the exchange is deserted and speculative trade in oil is dead. Part of the big building is a clothier’s store and offices are rented for sleeping-apartments. Myer Lowentritt, Stewart Simpson, “Eddie” Selden, Samuel Justus and a half-dozen others are seen occasionally, but days pass without a solitary transaction, the surging crowds have vanished and activity is a dream of bygone years.