Standard Oil incorporated
John D. Rockefeller and his partners incorporated Standard Oil of Ohio on January 10, 1870, with $1 million in capital. Over the next two decades, Standard absorbed nearly every refining and pipeline competitor in the United States through a combination of secret railroad rebates, predatory pricing, and outright purchase. By 1882, Standard's secret 'Trust' agreement controlled roughly 90 percent of U.S. refining capacity. By 1904, Rockefeller was the richest American who had ever lived, and Standard had become the template for every subsequent industrial monopoly. The first commodity-driven monopoly in modern American history was an energy monopoly.
Ida Tarbell's 1904 'History of the Standard Oil Company' — partly motivated by the destruction of her father's small refinery — was the first investigative-journalism takedown of a Gilded Age corporation and helped create both the antitrust movement and modern muckraking journalism. Energy reporting and antitrust politics were born together.
03 · Black Gold
Oil arrived as a curiosity — a medicine, a lamp fuel, a substitute for whale oil — and within fifty years had become the most strategic commodity on Earth. The first commercial well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859. By 1911 a single American family controlled most of the world's refined oil. By 1914 the British Royal Navy had switched from coal to oil at Churchill's insistence, and the country with the best oil reserves was no longer Britain. The 20th century is, in plain economic terms, the century the energy capital moved from Tyneside to Texas — and from Texas, eventually, to Riyadh.
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