CHAPTER X

PETROLEUM AND OTHER INDUSTRIES

Petroleum products not only enter as an essential into great industries; but their manufacture and distribution have given birth to many allied industries directly connected with the oil business. The plant of a modern refinery, for instance, by no means begins and ends with equipment for the distillation and treatment of oil. We have seen that the petroleum industry has given birth to an underground transportation system entirely unique, which accomplishes something impossible to railroads, under any conceivable organization. The architectural breadth and completeness of detail which characterize the petroleum industry as now organized, also extend to many mechanical trades. The modern refinery is a self-contained institution. It goes outside its own organization for little. Besides its still hands and other types of oil workers it has its corps of carpenters, pattern makers, machinists, acetylene welders, boilermakers, sheet iron workers, riveters, blacksmiths and the like. A modern refinery of the large type is a complex industrial unit, astonishing in its diversity of duties and pursuits. Among them this army of workers construct almost everything that is necessary to carry out the work of storage and distribution. Steel, delivered from the rolling mills in immense plates, emerges in the form of tank wagons, stills, condensers, tanks and all the varied equipment of the refining industry. Highly technical and intricate mechanical operations are carried out in connection with the manufacture of these accessories. The lay visitor to such an institution will find himself amazed by the sight of roller shears that cut out half an inch of iron neatly and easily. Punching a four inch washer out of solid half-inch steel is a relatively light operation with the power available. By means of the multiple punch a row of holes is cut in a sheet of steel within fewer seconds than it would have taken the village blacksmith of the olden time hours to execute. The hydraulic press pats the steel plates into the required shape with a stroke of several tons. Cutting steel with an acetylene flame is a familiar sight, and the man who operates this torch could cut a hole in the side of a battleship in short order. Electric cranes toss beams weighing twenty tons or more about as though they were jack-straws. By such processes a tank capable of holding 55,000 barrels of oil comes into being with astonishing expedition. The production of the barrels, boxes and innumerable subsidiary requirements of a great manufacturing industry are all a part of the plant’s activities. Refineries also provide a considerable portion of their own fuel. The gas produced in the refining process is collected to run gas engines which provide power for various mechanical operations.

Although the refinery is self contained, the various branches of oil production, transportation and treatment have been a stimulus to many industries. Invention has been applied to the construction of improved oil drilling and pumping machinery; the pump lines themselves are prefaced by mechanical production of the requisite piping. Of the petroleum industry was born the tank steamer and the tank car. Though the crude reaches the refinery largely by means of its own transportation system, its various transformations leave by other routes. Most of the gasoline and other products that are consumed on this continent find their way from the refinery to the distributing stations in tank cars, which have become an institution on American railways. Solid trains of them leave the great refineries every day; without them it would be impossible to deliver the various petroleum products, indispensable to industry, to consumers so expeditiously as now.

Petroleum’s faculty, as a standardized industry, of attracting to itself subsidiary trades is, however, but a negligible consideration in comparison with its relation to industry and commerce in the larger sense of these terms. The noted English publicist, Sydney Brooks, has drawn a pen picture of the marvellous interpenetration of the world’s industrial fabric which has taken place within the past fifty years.

“To-day” says Brooks, “petroleum enters into our daily life under the guise of at least 250 different and marketable commodities. It lights our lamps and stoves; it cleans our clothes; it prepares our varnishes; it acts as a substitute for turpentine in the printing, dyeing and painting industries; it invades our tables in the form of artificial butter, confectionery and a number of other edibles; it supplies us with our wax, our candles, our chewing gum, and a vast array of ointments, salves and drugs; it furnishes the dressing table with perfumes and the smoking room with matches; it imparts the final lustre to our collars and shirts; and the textile trades use enormous quantities of it for finishing soft goods; it medicates our bodies and gives to preserved fruits their peculiarly toothsome appearance; it blends with animal and vegetable oils in a range of combinations almost infinite; its residue can be burned as coke, or used in the manufacture of electric arc-lights, or employed in road making as a rival to asphalt; it lubricates our machinery and drives our motor cars, our ships, our aeroplanes, our locomotives, our ploughs and tractors. By means of it every form of transportation on land, in the air, on the seas and below the sea, has been immeasurably extended and in many instances revolutionized. There must be at least a hundred trades that now use oil for heat and power purposes where ten or fifteen years ago they used nothing but coal. The demands for it are indeed illimitable.”

Mr. Brooks is speaking exclusively of the part that petroleum plays in the industrial and social life of Great Britain. In the United States its applications are wider still. Were it necessary, it would be possible to dilate on the relation of petroleum to agriculture in this country, where the farmer who operates a large acreage in the middle west or in Texas and California, by means of tractors finds petroleum an indispensable ally. In this sense petroleum has helped enormously to increase the food supplies of the world and the national wealth of the United States.

One of the greatest, if not the greatest of modern industries on this continent--the manufacture of motor cars--would to all intents and purposes be non-existent were it not for one offspring of petroleum (once regarded as almost the least valuable product of the refinery) gasoline. Invention has reacted radically on the oil industry, from decade to decade, and especially on its refining phase. Until the advent of what is known as the “internal combustion” engine, for instance, the demand for gasoline was so limited that when produced, as was inevitable in the distillation of many types of crude, it represented but a fraction of its present value. To-day this engine, which lives and functions by gasoline, has created an ever-increasing demand for that fluid which taxes the energy of all refineries to meet.

The internal combustion engine with the assistance of petroleum has indeed exercised such a powerful influence in changing the face of civilization as to demand fuller reference. It not only made the automobile practicable, but the aeroplane, the dirigible air-ship, the submarine and a host of other craft possible. When, during the autumn of 1919, the entire railroad system of Great Britain was paralyzed by a general strike, and the people of its great and overcrowded cities were face to face with starvation, it was admittedly the internal combustion engine, operated by gasoline (commonly known overseas as motor spirit or petrol)--that saved the situation. To understand its appellation the reader should note the fact that the older forms of engines were operated by steam generated in boilers, heated by external combustion--a process familiar to everyone. The internal combustion engine, on the contrary, runs by fuel (usually gasoline) which is introduced directly into the contrivance itself. There it is vaporized and mixed with air so as to become an explosive substance with great powers of propulsion. It is not difficult to grasp the immense saving of weight and space which is involved by the elimination of the boiler from the mechanism of an engine. During the war especially, the minds of all mechanical experts were applied to improvements that would result in an engine being made lighter and lighter with each new model, while at the same time meeting enormous power demands. Without such space-saving contrivances the flying machine would never have reached its modern development, and the motor car would not have come into general use. The revolution effected by automatic traction alone, with the co-operation of petroleum, would have seemed incredible a generation ago. The pioneer users of motor cars bought their gasoline at drug stores. To-day the “gas” stations in every country village and in connection with every large garage and auto-livery give testimony to the part a single product of petroleum plays in the social and commercial life of the American people. The automobile industry, which could hardly have been born without petroleum as an auxiliary, now represents an enormous investment in this and other countries giving employment to innumerable workmen of all classes.

Oil as a source of power is to all intents and purposes an outgrowth of the twentieth century. Its function as a source of light and heat is historical. Lighting by means of oil lamps has in itself undergone great improvements since the early days and the use of oil as a fuel in a manner distinct from its application to automobiles, aeroplanes and other inventions operated by gasoline engines, is steadily increasing. It is taking its place as a substitute for coal, not only in the United States but to a marked extent in other countries. For some of them it may be said to have proved a solution for railroad problems that were at one time almost insuperable. Russia, for instance, for the last thirty years, and up to the time when internal conditions disrupted her industrial organization, utilized her own petroleum for fuel. The railroads of Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and other Latin American countries as well as in Roumania are now served by oil burning locomotives where a decade or so ago coal or wood was employed. In this country the Southern Pacific Railroad and other well known transportation corporations have demonstrated that the locomotive run by liquid fuel is an economic success; in 1919 the amount of fuel oil used for this purpose in the United States was approximately 50,000,000 barrels. Railroad experts have discovered that the steaming capacity of a locomotive running on fuel oil is so materially increased that it is possible to haul with it a greater tonnage at a much increased speed than would be possible with a coal fired engine.

[Illustration: “Look boxes” in the “Still House,” where the grades of oil are separated according to gravity, the process being known as the separation of “cuts”]

[Illustration: A modern tanker carrying 4,000,000 gallons of oil]

Oil as a domestic fuel is gradually making its way because of the advantages it gives in the matter of cleanliness. Even the time-honoured oil stove has been subjected to such improvements as to be a vastly more acceptable inmate of the home than it was in days gone by. The use of petroleum as a fuel for stationary engines in manufacturing plants has also kept pace with its employment in other directions and here again its superior heating power, the elimination of dust and the saving of labour involved are economic factors of first importance.

The invention of new devices for the utilization of oil have necessarily proven a stimulus to manufacture. Indeed, it would be impossible to trace the myriad paths by which petroleum enters into the public and domestic economy of the civilized world. So far we have left untouched one of its most pregnant applications; its relation to sea power and to maritime commerce, which is so wide and important as to justify a separate chapter.