Chapter 61: New Energy, New Engine
Chapter 61: New Energy, New Engine
In the mid-19th Century, two new industrial developments were underway. In the UK and US, new discoveries were made for the refining of crude petroleum into numerous useful oils. Meanwhile, in France and Germany, engineers were starting to produce the first commercially viable internal combustion engines. Together, these two breakthroughs would open up a world of possibilities and, in time, put an end to the Steam Age.
If you’re in the Boston area, be sure to catch Dave’s upcoming Mill Talk at the Chares River Museum of Industry and Innovation on Tuesday, November 15th! Register here.
Sources for this episode include:
Allitt, Patrick N. “The Industrial Revolution.” The Great Courses. 2014.
Boyd, Andy. “Samuel Kier.” Engines of Our Ingenuity, episode 3178. University of Houston. https://www.uh.edu/engines/epi3178.htm
Clark, Laura. “Oil Companies First Built Pipelines in the 1860s; They’ve Been Contested Ever Since.” Smithsonian Magazine. 12 Jan 2015. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/americas-first-oil-pipelines-180953870/
“Edwin Drake: American oil driller.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Last updated: 27 Sept 2016.
Hill, Vahok. “Alcohol Fuel Basics - Alcohol 101.” Motortrend. 28 Dec 2011. https://www.motortrend.com/how-to/ctrp-1201-alcohol-fuel-basics/
McInnis, Karen. “Samuel Kier.” Penn State Library. Fall 2007. https://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/literary-cultural-heritage-map-pa/bios/Kier__Samuel_Martin
Morris, Charles R. The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy. Henry Holt and Co. 2005.
Rhodes, Richard. Energy: A Human History. Simon & Schuster. 2018.
Weeks, Lyman Horace. Automobile Biographies. The Monograph Press. 1904.
Weightman, Gavin. The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914. Grove Press. 2007.
Full Transcript
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By 1852, the jig was up. Businessman Samuel Martin Keir could no longer find buyers for his medicinal “Rock Oil.”
Born in rural Pennsylvania in 1813, Kier moved to Pittsburg at age 21 and began a career of serial entrepreneurship. He started out in the railroad business before the Panic of 1837 tanked his company. Then he started a business to manage canal operations between Pittsburg and Lake Erie.
Eventually he tried creating hybrid boats that could float along the canals or travel on railroad tracks behind a locomotive. This scheme didn’t work, but by the time he gave it up in 1854, he was diversified with several other businesses in operation. He had a factory that made brick and pottery. He had interests in steel and iron.
And then there was the oil.
As we discussed back in Chapter 36, the market for spermaceti oil had nearly led to the extinction of sperm whales by the mid-19th Century. What’s more, spermaceti oil was too expensive for the average household. But the introduction of fossil fuels changed this dynamic. Coal gas started being used for public lighting in cities across the world. Abraham Gesner created kerosene from coal to light home lamps as well.
Then there was the Scottish carpenter-turned-scientist James Young, who discovered a distillation process to turn shale into petroleum. From his Paraffin Light and Mineral Oil Company in Bathgate – a small town between Glasgow and Edinburgh – Young employed some 1,500 workers who used the oil to make kerosene and paraffin wax. But the processes involved limited the mass production potential of the stuff and drove up the costs.
These limitations would be overcome in the United States, though. In Pennsylvania, there were giant pools of crude petroleum just waiting for human beings beneath the ground.
Samuel Kier’s fascination with oil began in 1846. His father had a salt well just up the Allegheny River. Now, salt deposits could be found beneath the earth across western Pennsylvania. To extract it, salt farmers like the Keirs would drill beneath the earth and use water to help dissolve the salt, then pump it up to the surface. Except, many of them would find that petroleum coming up from the wells too.
Of course, the salt farmers didn’t have much use for this black goo, so usually they’d dump it in a nearby river (because you could do such things in 19th Century America). According to legend, it was when Keir dumped some crude oil in a canal that a fire started and the canal itself went up in flames. Suddenly, he realized the commercial potential of the stuff.
But this story is almost certainly myth. For one thing, people have known since biblical times that petroleum burns. In fact, the Keirs burned this oil in lamps at their salt well to operate it at night. The problem was that burning crude oil creates a thick, black smoke, so it wasn’t preferable to the illuminants on the market at the time, like whale spermaceti.
The real story, I think, is more interesting – or at least it’s more peculiar. When Keir’s wife got sick in 1849, her doctor prescribed her something called “American Medicinal Oil.” Keir basically thought, “Hey, there’s tons of this oil stuff in my dad’s salt well! Why don’t I sell it as medicine?”
Over the next three years, Keir went into full 19th-Century quack mode and produced eight-ounce bottles of “Kier’s Petroleum or Rock Oil” and had distributors sell them out of their wagons for 50 cents each. They claimed the Rock Oil could cure everything from asthma, arthritis, and indigestion to burns, cholera, and even blindness. But when it failed to win much in the way of repeat customers, he offloaded what he could to drugstores and shifted gears.
Looking for alternative uses for his rock oil, Keir took some to a Philadelphia scientist named James C. Booth, who was working in a laboratory there for a chemicals company. Booth recommended Keir try distilling the petroleum – much like how you distill whiskey from fermented grain alcohol. He even showed Keir how to build a still.
Setting up his still back in Pittsburg, Keir refined his crude oil and produced a new substance he called “carbon oil.” It was kerosene by another name. Much like Young had created in Scotland, and like Gesner had created from coal, this petroleum-distilled kerosene was cleaner, safer, and more economical than most illuminants on the market. It sold well, and Keir expanded the business and began selling special lamps along with the oil to burn it in.
And while he never became a millionaire oil magnate – this was, after all, just one of his many hustles – Samuel Keir would go down in history as the “Grandfather of the American Oil Industry.” Oil refining was a major innovation which soon catalyzed a new industry – about a hundred miles north of him, a new oil well would be drilled by the end of the decade. And by the end of the century, oil was challenging King Coal to become the energy source of the future.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 61: New Energy, New Engine
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Okay, there are some administrative notes before we get started today.
First of all, I want to thank everyone who has stuck by me since I decided to scale back the podcast. I received nothing but positive feedback since then and it really means a lot to me.
Special shout outs to Simon Lumb, Hans Fredrik Hansen, Regina Köhler, and new patrons David Williams and Naomi Kanakia, as well as Jim Ankenbrandt, John Bartlett, Adam Bibby, Chris Bradford, Elizabeth Brooking, Harriet Buchanan, Tara Carlson, Matthew Frost, Michael Hausknecht, Jeremy Hoffman, Eric Hogensen, Ian Le Quesne, Brian Long, Mac Loveland, Andrew C. Madigan, Martin Mann, Duncan McHale, John Newton, Emeka Okafor, Ido Ouziel, Joshua Shanley, Kristian Sibast, Jonathan Smith, Ross Templeton, and Seth Wiener. Thank you.
Second, this is going to be the final regular chapter for 2022. However, there will be a special episode coming soon, and it’s something of a live show.
I have been invited to speak at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation for their Mill Talk series next month. This museum is at the site of Francis Cabot Lowell’s first textile mill in Waltham, Massachusetts (Shout out Chapter 33!), and this talk is sponsored by the Lowell Institute. I’m going to talk about the ongoing history of what economists call “creative destruction” – from textile workers in the 18th century to rideshare drivers in the 21st century.
So, if you’re in the Boston area, come check it out. It’s going to be Tuesday, November 15th at the Charles River Museum, and the event is free and open to the public. But you will need to register. To do that, go to CharlesRiverMuseum.org/events and follow the necessary links. I’ll also have the direct link in the episode notes for this episode. After this event, the museum will publish a video of the talk, and I’ll be posting the audio here as a bonus episode.
Alright, with that, let’s get on with the show.
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Now that it was clear that crude oil could be refined into kerosene, investors spotted an opportunity. In 1854, businessman George Bissell and lawyer Johnathan Eveleth formed the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company and searched for land where oil could be tapped.
Seeking investors, they pitched a group of New Haven bankers who instructed them to enlist the expertise of one Benjamin Silliman, a professor of chemistry at Yale. Through a repetitive series of tiresome distillation experiments, Silliman identified seven different component oils in petroleum that could be extracted by refining it. Most critically, he determined that some of these oils could be cost-effective replacements for coal- and spermaceti-based illuminants.
Following Silliman’s optimistic reports, those New Haven bankers decided to cut out Bissell and Eveleth and formed their own oil company – Seneca Oil. Duking it out for petty control of the not-yet-existent industry, the two companies competed for land and talent.
For Seneca Oil, their big victory over Pennsylvania Rock Oil was the hiring of one Edwin Laurentine Drake.
The son of a farming family, Drake had started his career on the railroads and even spent time as a conductor before illness forced him to find a more stable career. At that point, Seneca Oil agreed to pay Drake an annual salary of $1,000 to explore for crude oil in western Pennsylvania. Moving there with his young wife and children in 1858, the company introduced him to the locals as “Colonel Drake” for his prior service in a state militia.
Drake zeroed in on Oil Creek – a tributary of the Allegheny River around which local farmers had been finding crude oil for decades. To extract the oil, he would use a modified salt drill and pump to establish an oil well – a still novel idea at that time. And he said he was prepared to go as deep as a thousand feet beneath the earth’s surface to bring up the petroleum.
But despite repeated attempts, Colonel Drake and his workers had no luck, and he was running out of money in the process. Begging the company for more and even taking out a loan, he was able to make progress drilling at a site near Titusville, Pennsylvania in April 1859. He brought one William Smith onto his team, a local drilling expert better known as “Uncle Billy.” Encountering new problems and inventing new solutions on the fly, Drake’s team continued drilling for the next four months. Area farmers – already skeptical about the value of the petroleum under their lands – started calling the project “Drake’s folly.”
Finally, on August 27, 1859, the drill hit a bedrock 69 feet beneath the surface. The next day, Uncle Billy found crude oil gushing up from their new well. Using a basic hand pump, they began pumping the oil from this first American oil well into a bathtub.
What followed was nothing less than an oil rush – not all that unlike the gold rushes seen earlier in the same decade. The well at Titusville was soon producing 35 barrels a day, selling for $20 per barrel. Today, that would be equivalent to a nearly $9 million annual output. (By the way, the barrels they used were the local Pennsylvania barrels, which could hold 42 gallons of liquid. That measurement – the Pennsylvania barrel, as it’s called – is the amount we talk about today when we talk about barrels of crude oil.) By the end of the next year, as many as half a million barrels were shipped out of the Oil Creek area. One more year later, and the number hit a whopping 2 million.
It didn’t take long for folks to realize how much cash there was to be made, and speculators started pouring into western Pennsylvania to get rich quick. With virtually none of the relevant technologies for drilling or refining oil patented, competitors raced to form new companies. They began buying up or leasing lands in western Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and they started drilling. As it turned out, getting rich quick was much easier here than in the gold mines of California.
Refineries were also established to process the black gold into the various oil products identified by Silliman.
The most important of these was kerosene, which could replace the coal-based kerosene developed by Gessner and used in the Argand lamps found in households across the industrializing world. Other oils, like Vaseline, could be used as lubricants in the many new machines and engines of the industrial age. Natural gas was another product which was identified as a possible replacement to the coal gas used in the gas lighting systems of industrial cities. The distillation process also allowed refiners to make one more product I have to mention – it wasn’t seen as very useful at the time (it was merely used as a local anesthetic) but was later discovered to be very useful indeed: Gasoline.
To transport crude oil to refineries, further innovations were required. Originally , the barrels were moved by horse and wagon, and eventually by rail. Several pipelines were developed in the early 1860s, though they faced all sorts of challenges. Made originally from wood and eventually from wrought iron, these lines used the forces of steam power and gravity to move the crude oil from the well head to the railroad. But they often leaked, and they alarmed traditional transport workers. Armed guards had to be hired to stop teamsters from attacking the pipelines with pickaxes and burning the spilled oil. But by 1865, the first successful pipeline was moving up to 2,000 barrels worth of petroleum per day over some five miles.
Refining oil was about as profitable as drilling it. Using a very basic distilling process, the early refineries kept costs low while selling into a market with high demand. Under these conditions, the refineries could become profitable after a single production run. Hundreds of refineries were in operation, scattered across the region, within a decade.
Then – out of nowhere and with hardly anybody noticing – the oil refining industry was rapidly consolidated under the control of one shrewd businessman.
John Davison Rockefeller was born in the tiny town of Richford, New York, in 1839. It was in the heart of the burned-over district (shout out Chapter 45!) and, sure enough, Rockefeller was a lifelong and hardcore Baptist, crediting his faith for his success in business.
Not that he came from a religious family. His father, “Big Bill” Rockefeller, was a traveling charlatan doctor, magician, and con-artist who often faked being mute and was (at least on one occasion) accused of rape at gunpoint. John later learned his father was a bigamist – in his long work trips supposedly selling his garbage medicine, he was actually spending time with his second family in another town, where he was known as “Doc” William Levingston. As John D. Rockefeller’s notoriety grew, he simply chose to dodge questions about his parentage.
To get Big Bill out of their lives, the rest of the Rockefellers moved to the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio. The younger Rockefeller was the polar opposite of his father – sober, studious, and reliable in his work. He breezed through school – graduating early and taking business classes before getting a bookkeeping job at age 16. Just a couple years later, he bought into a partnership with one Maurice Clark, a local produce merchant. This was just in time for the Civil War, and their business made a small fortune supplying food to the Union army.
And as the war was just beginning, Clark and Rockefeller were approached by a chemist name Sam Andrews who proposed they go into the oil business.
Seeing the refinery boom across the region – including there in Cleveland, where refineries had access to international shipping at the city’s Lake Erie port – the trio decided to start their own, dubbing it the Excelsior Oil Works. Rockefeller soon became obsessed with petroleum, managing the refinery business so meticulously that, by the end of the war, it was the one of the largest and most profitable refineries in the country.
But over that same period, Clark and Rockefeller had a falling out. In March 1865, Rockefeller put a notice in a local newspaper dissolving their partnership, kicking off a bidding war for the company. Andrews joined Rockefeller in the fight, and they ended up spending an unthinkable sum – $100,000 – to buy out Clark. But the joke was on Clark. The next year, Excelsior Oil brought in $1.2 million in sales. And that’s 1866 dollars.
So, how did Rockefeller consolidate the oil industry?
First of all, he benefited from a little good luck – namely, the luck of his location. Despite its distance from the source of the oil in western Pennsylvania, Cleveland grew in industrial importance during the Civil War and in America’s railroad age. The Pennsylvania Railroad charged too much for its Pittsburg-to-Philadelphia line, making it unattractive for industrial freight. But other railroads – like those owned by our old friends Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt – charged low fees for westward travel.
The real money, they knew, came from shipping agricultural products west-to-east. And rather than send empty freight cars back west, they encouraged Pennsylvania oil producers to ship their petroleum west to the refineries in Cleveland – from there, the finished oils could be sent to all corners of the globe.
Second, Rockefeller was a bigtime risk taker. He expanded his oil empire by buying up competitor oil refineries, at prices often at or near the true valuation of the rival firm. This both gave him a reputation for being a fair dealer and – more importantly – it allowed him to grow that empire all the quicker. (It’s a lot easier to make a deal when you’re not trying to lowball the price.) During an especially frantic period of buyouts in 1877 and 1878, one of Rockefeller’s agents wrote him several letters complaining about their weak posture in negotiations, and referring to the rivals being bought out as “pure black-mailing operators.” But Rockefeller knew that oil production was on pace to grow higher than demand, and he wanted to monopolize as much as he could of the nation’s refining, storage, and transport of petroleum, thus allowing him to save these holdings from an otherwise inevitable crash. By monopolizing oil, he could control production and prices, making him the richest man in the world.
Third, Rockefeller was obsessed with the quality of his oil. And, as a result, he was quick to adopt the latest scientific advancements in his refineries, and readily employed the best talent he could find. When he’d buy out a refinery, he’d keep skilled managers employed there and even offered promotions to the especially talented. Thanks to these instincts, the process of refining oil became much more professional, and it allowed Rockefeller to build a successful brand.
Over the course of about 30 years, Rockefeller grew his small partnership into the nation’s most significant monopoly trust – the publicly-traded Standard Oil. Much like the railroad tycoons, Rockefeller was leaving the partnership business model behind for the more expansive joint-stock corporations, tightly held across several states. By 1882, it controlled more than 85% of the U.S. market and held onto that market share for decades. And by 1904, Standard Oil was worth over a quarter billion dollars in assets. But it struggled to control the price for long periods of time, as more and more prospectors found petroleum under them, driving up the supply of crude oil.
New wells were discovered not only in Texas, Oklahoma, and California (to name the obvious examples), but also in Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Persia, and most especially, the Russian Empire. Around the same time that Drake struck oil in Titusville, new wells and refineries were being established in Russian-controlled territories including modern-day Poland, Romania, and Azerbaijan.
It was in the oil fields north of Baku, on the Caspian Sea, where Robert and Ludwig Nobel made their fortune. The older brothers of our old friend, Alfred Nobel, they began bringing in drillers from the U.S. in 1873 and found gusher after gusher. The most impressive thing the Nobels did was concoct the first ever oil tankers – ships with large, metallic containers to store the petroleum – which they could send off from the Caspian Sea port in Baku. They soon made this its own business and began supplying oil tankers to Americans as well. By the 1880s, the Nobels controlled about half the Russian oil market.
By the turn of the century, the Russians were beating even the Americans in terms of oil production – accounting for 52% of the world’s petroleum supply, compared to the U.S.’s 43% share. (Though the U.S. would pull ahead, come the Texas oil boom in the first decade of the 1900s.)
And also by the turn of the century, the demand for oil was growing ever sharper, as folks discovered a very practical use for gasoline.
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For most of history, the four most common sources of power were human muscle, animal muscle, wind, and water. We learned this in Chapter 7, remember? Then came the steam engine, and the world would never be the same.
Steam power spread across the world, even to countries with relatively low levels of industrialization. By the time Thomas Edison was distributing electricity to power mere lightbulbs, the steam engine had been in widespread use – powering mine drains, mills, steamboats, steamships, and locomotives – for a hundred years.
But since the early days of steam technology right through the start of the Second Industrial Revolution, engineers dreamed of an even more powerful engine. One that could power pistons with explosive gas forces contained within the device. By burning fuel within a chamber to create this combustion, you could power the system more directly, saving fuel and increasing kinetic energy, all with a more compact engine.
Among those who theorized about or experimented to create such an internal combustion engine were old friends of ours like Christiaan Huygens and Denis Papin, Allessandro Volta, Phillipe LeBon, Nicéphore Niépce, and Sadi Carnot.
We last discussed Carnot back in Chapter 55. A French military engineer known to history as the “Father of Thermodynamics”, he wrote the 1824 book Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire. Envisioning an ideal heat engine, it inspired thermodynamic physicists focused on the scientific theory (including Lord Kelvin and Rudolf Clausius) as well as practical mechanics focused on building better engines.
Over the years, such engines were designed and built in France, Italy, Switzerland, the UK, and the US, but none were commercially viable. That is, until Belgian engineer Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir patented his internal combustion engine in 1860.
Born in Mussy-la-Ville in 1822 (it was actually part of Luxembourg at the time), Lenoir emigrated to Paris as a teenager to become a professional scientist. He was not particularly well off nor well educated, so he took work as a waiter and later as an enameller and decorator. It was in this work with jewelry that Lenoir began making new inventions, including a new kind of electrotyping process for metals.
From there he began experiments in electricity. These experiments led him to make several inventions, including an electric motor, a dynamo regulator, and a system of autographic telegraphy. And, by using an electric ignition, he was able to build the first commercially viable internal combustion engine.
It looked a bit like an old Watt steam engine, but it operated much differently. Rather than deriving power from steam pressure created by burning coal, this engine was ignited electrically and derived power directly from the illuminant gasses burned inside it, driving a piston. Thus, Lenoir called it his “gas engine.”
From there, he started a new corporation that capitalized at 2 million francs. Publicity for the engine was going great, with one French newspaper going so far as to declare the end of the steam age.
But the gas engine was far from perfect. Using non-compressed fuel, it could only achieve about a half horsepower. He tried using it for an automobile he built (the Hippomobile he called it), but it averaged less than 2 miles per hour. He also tried using it for a power boat, but that fared little better. What’s more, the engine was very loud and jerky. It could really only be used as a compact stationary engine for limited runs, and Lenoir ended up selling the patents and returning to electrical experiments instead.
But the breakthrough was so promising that other engineers decided to keep pursuing it. And though it was born in Paris, the internal combustion engine would grow up (so to speak) in that other rising power of the Second Industrial Revolution: Germany.
Nicolaus August Otto was born in a small village on the east bank of the Rhine in 1832. His father, a postmaster and innkeeper, died when Otto was just a baby. So, despite his good marks, he had to drop out of school early to enter the workforce to help the family make ends meet. After some years working for a grocer and then as a clerk, he relocated to Cologne where his brother got him a job as a travelling salesman, hocking colonial goods like coffee, tea, and sugar to grocers across western Germany.
Then, in 1860, Otto and his brother learned about the invention of the Lenoir gas engine. Realizing such an engine could be used to build an automobile, Otto imagined the possibilities it would open up to his trade. It would be much easier to get around to all these grocers with a car. Several automobiles had been invented or designed using steam power, but none were economically viable. The internal combustion engine could change that.
With his brother, Otto designed his own gas engine – one that would run on a petroleum vapor mixed with air. And then he took it to one Michael Zons – a friend of his who owned a machine shop. Together, Otto and Zons built a prototype that would use alcohol for fuel, and Otto submitted a patent application, noting how such an engine would “propel vehicles serviceably and easily along country roads, as well as prove useful for the purposes of small industry.”
The authorities rejected the patent, claiming the invention was too similar to that of other inventors’. But Otto and Zons continued to work on their engine. They adjusted their approach, and Otto developed an idea for a four-stroke engine cycle. Within one cycle, the piston would first pull in the air-fuel mixture by creating a vacuum as it moves downward; second, compress the mixture in preparation for ignition; third, combust the mixture by igniting the engine; and finally, fourth, release the spent air through the exhaust valve.
The four-stroke cycle would be game-changing, if only it worked.
Instead, he returned to the atmospheric principles of the Watt steam engine and built his gas-powered atmospheric engine. Nearly bankrupt by this point, Otto brought on an investor by the name of Eugene Langen – an engineer from a successful capitalist family. The atmospheric engine performed well and was more fuel-efficient than a Lenoir engine, winning it a gold medal at the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris.
Within the next five years, they sold hundreds of these engines to buyers across Europe and in the United States. They built a new factory and began to turn a profit. They then brought on new partners, forming Gasmortoren-Fabrik Deutz AG, and hired a new manager – Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler.
An experienced engineer with a university education and time spent in the UK, Daimler was the man Otto needed to turn his vision into reality. Along with Chief Designer Wilhelm Maybach, Daimler helped Otto complete a working model of the four-stroke engine. From then on, the four strokes were known as the “Otto cycle”. It significantly increased the power and efficiency of gas engines. The company was soon selling thousands of these engines each year.
And other internal combustion engines were coming on the market as well.
In 1872, the same year Otto and Langen hired Daimler, an American engineer named George Brayton invented his own thermodynamic cycle. This two-stroke process allowed for continual revolutions, driving pistons with constant pressure. With a simple liquid fuel injection system, it was easy to use, and was dubbed “Brayton’s Ready Motor.”
In 1884, British engineer Edward Butler developed his own liquid-fuel motor, inventing key parts for it, including a coil ignition, carburetor, and spark plug. The liquid fuel he chose for it? Gasoline. (Or, as he called it, “petrol” since it was refined petroleum. And as I understand it, that’s why gasoline is called “petrol” on that side of the pond.)
And in 1892, Rudolph Diesel invented his Diesel Engine. Born in Paris to German parents, and raised in France and England, Diesel spent nearly two decades studying thermodynamic engineering before moving to Berlin in his early 30s to take charge of a Research & Development team working on high-pressure internal combustion engines. The research nearly killed him – one engine explosion put him in the hospital for months and left him with eyesight problems for the rest of his life. But by 1897, he finally had a working model. The diesel engine proved critical for the development of larger and more advanced machinery.
Meanwhile, though, Nicolaus Otto and Gottlieb Daimler had a falling out. As their engine sales delivered steady profit throughout the 1870s, Otto lost interest in the development of the automobile. The same could not be said of Daimler. What’s more, Otto was jealous of the university-educated Daimler, who proved more important to Otto’s company than Otto himself was. Daimler, meanwhile, was jealous of the power Otto wielded. The two men clashed repeatedly, necessitating Langen to intervene. At one point, he even tried creating distance between Otto and Daimler by sending the latter to St. Petersburg, with the intention of opening a factory in Russia. But Daimler decided he didn’t want to live in frigid Russia and, instead, quit the company and returned to Germany to start his own. Taking Wilhelm Maybach with him, he relocated to Stuttgart and began building cars. There, along with rival Carl Benz in nearby Mannheim, they kickstarted the automobile industry.
But that’s a story for another time.
Now, here’s the thing: In the late 19th Century, it was not a foregone conclusion that refined petroleum would be the standard fuel of the internal combustion engine. So how did it happen?
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Around the turn of the 20th Century, internal combustion engines were spreading across the world, most notably for the early automobiles. But there was no standard fuel for these engines. They ran on numerous possible energy sources, including gasoline and diesel, as well as town gas, kerosene, burning fluid, and alcohols like menthol and ethanol, or any number of possible mixtures thereof.
But petrol soon became the dominant fuel for a few reasons.
First of all, Edward Butler’s invention of the carburetor – soon used by Daimler and Benz for their automobiles – made gasoline not only a possible fuel, but a very efficient and practical fuel. With a relatively dense energy content, gasoline was easier to ignite within the engine than many other possible sources.
Second, gasoline was relatively easy to find in these early days. Not only was it employed in anesthesia, it was also widely available in general stores as a cleaning agent. At the same time, gasoline was usually cheaper than kerosene and other kinds of refined petroleum.
Even so, alcohols remained an alternative fuel source for decades, with automakers like the Ford Motor Company offering a flex fuel engine into the 1930s. But unlike the pipelines and tankers and railroad cars built to move petroleum in and out of refineries in the late 19th Century, or the systems to to deliver gasoline to filling stations, there was no such infrastructure set up for alcohols. These were largely produced on farms and moved in small batches. As a result, alcohols were more cost prohibitive.
That being said, alcohol was seen as an excellent additive for petrol. It could significantly improve the octane rating of gasoline – and thus, improve the fuel efficiency and the performance of the engine. Plus, unlike crude oil and other fossil fuels, alcohols were renewable energy sources, since they were derived from grains. In 1921, after years of research, General Motors scientists Charles Kettering and Thomas Midgley landed on tetraethyl lead alcohol as the most feasible standard additive for gasoline. GM partnered with Standard Oil to produce the additive, putting Kettering and Midgley in charge, and thus this poisonous “ethyl” fuel would be found in gasoline for the next half century or so.
In Diesel engines, meanwhile, the fuel was not ignited by a spark, but by the heat of compressed air fueled by a spray injection. Gasoline would be a much too volatile fuel in such an engine. Thus, the Diesel engine required diesel fuel – a less refined oil product. While dirtier, its use in heavy engines allows for greater efficiency, making it possible to operate larger machines.
Thanks to gasoline and diesel, and the engines they power, a new world of possibilities was opened. The most obvious applications were in transportation – not only cars and trucks, but locomotives, motorboats, ships, and even aircrafts. They were adopted in electric turbines and generators, as well as tractors, chainsaws, pressure washers, and a slew of landscaping tools like lawnmowers and leaf-blowers.
But the transport applications were the most critical – not only for greater ease of movement for travelers, but for a broader distribution of food, machinery, and other goods and services. They not only helped along the expansion of urban and suburban areas, but greater economic security for rural areas too.
Although petroleum was clearly a quite profitable industry, the advancement of the internal combustion engine made it a mega-powerful industry – one of the most protected imaginable. In the years since, the supply of oil has been seen as central to world events from the Suez Canal Crisis to the Iraq War and beyond. Dependency on crude oil for our energy needs – including natural gas – makes for an incredibly volatile situation in Europe right now, as I am recording, as Western nations have sought to hold Russia accountable for its illegal war against Ukraine.
And, with the spread of the oil industry and the continued improvement of internal combustion engines, the steam engine was eventually eclipsed. It had been the breakthrough which defined the Industrial Age since the beginning – the coal-powered machined that gave us mill cities and steamships and entire rail networks. But by the 1940s and 50s, it had become obsolete. The First Industrial Revolution was truly long over, and the wheels of history continued forward.
But for now, let’s stay where we have been – in the late 19th Century. And let’s talk about this so-called “Gilded Age” next time on the Industrial Revolutions.
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Remember, listeners in the Boston area, to register for my Mill Talk on November 15th at CharlesRiverMusuem.org. Again, that link is in the episode notes for this episode. And don’t forget to follow along for new episodes, pictures, stories, and other updates for the podcast on social media. I’m on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram under the handle @IndRevPod – that’s @ I-N-D – R-E-V – P-O-D. You can also get updates by signing up for the email newsletter at IndustrialRevolutionsPod.com.
Thanks again.