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.