actual illumination , so camphene producers could not skimp on the tree extracts .
Whale oil was slightly more expensive than camphene . It was extracted from whale blubber renderings , and like lard oil and coal liquid it was a mish mash of oils and fibrous bits . Its variegated nature often became painfully obvious in use , as some of the ingredients sent forth a black , acrid plume that could leave the customer to reflect that any money saved at the point of purchase was somehow paid out later .
Sperm whales , those gargantuan beasts with the long flat row of teeth and broad foreheads , hold oil of a much more chemically consistent quality . Such oil burned bright and clean and sold for two to three times the price of generic whale oil .
The extraction of “ midnight oil ” from sperm whales is familiar to those who have enjoyed Herman Melville ’ s novel , Moby Dick , published during the height of this competition in 1851 . Melville ’ s readers were taught how to locate and harvest these valuable fluids from the sperm whale carcass . He wrote of the “ Heidelburgh Tun ” of the sperm whale — an allusion to a giant wine barrel stored in the cellar of a large castle in Heidelberg , Germany — where “ the most precious of all his oily vintages ,” namely the sperm whale ’ s oil and spermaceti , reside in the large snout-like area above the whale ’ s long row of teeth .
Melville ’ s description of the harvesting of spermaceti from the sperm whale carcass is fascinating , but it should be remembered that spermaceti and oil are different . The spermaceti that intrigued Melville is a soft , wax-like substance in the whale that hardens on exposure to air and worked perfectly as candle wax .
The spermaceti lay at the top of the whale ’ s snout , in the “ Case ,” in what Melville describes as an “ absolutely pure , limpid and odoriferous state .” Melville estimated that “ a large whale ’ s Case generally yields about 500 gallons of spermaceti , though from unavoidable circumstances , considerable of it is spilled , leaks and dribbles away , or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the ticklish business of securing what you can .”
The sperm whale oil is located between the Case and the whale ’ s large mouth , in — to use Melville ’ s words —“ one immense honeycomb of oil , formed by the crossing and re-crossing , into 10,000 infiltrated cells , of tough elastic white fibres .” When drained from within the honeycomb , however , this oil was of very consistent quality . The spermaceti and the oil could be harvested together on whaling ships in barrels and separated later by cooling , a process the whalers called “ wintering .”
Whaling ships , such as the Pequod captained by Melville ’ s Ahab , were often out for years at a time . The Pequod sailed southeast from Nantucket to the Azores , then south around the Cape of Good Hope and east all the way to the typhoonplagued waters off Japan to hunt the prized sperm whale . By modern standards , whaling was an almost impossibly difficult and dangerous way to make a living , yet Melville ’ s crew clearly relished the immense physical challenge it presented .
It was shortly after Moby Dick was published that crude oil changed everything .
Crude oil was initially a nuisance encountered in drilling for water and salt . An enterprising Pennsylvanian named Samuel Kier realized he could burn the crude to illuminate his salt works , but the raw crude burned in a smelly , smoky manner . He began working with a chemist nearby and learned that a certain fraction of it would burn more cleanly than the raw crude if it were distilled . Kier distilled and marketed this liquid lighting fluid .
( A simpler evaporation and filtration process had been used on coal since the 1820s to produce “ gaslight .” The flammable gas produced by this “ anaerobic ” heating process — what we today call “ natural gas ”— was pressurized and piped
Fleet of whalers in the port of San Francisco , 1864 .
to streetlamps and to chandeliers and sconces in upscale housing .)
At about the same time that Kier began producing his portable liquid lighting fluid from crude oil , a Canadian named Abraham Gesner was perfecting a similar process using coal and shale oil to collect a chemically identical liquid he called “ kerosene .”
Kier was lucky : a crude oil well was developed near him in August 1859 in Titusville , Pennsylvania . The Titusville drillers knew the crude they collected could be used to make low-cost lighting fluid ; they cared little about any supposed scarcity in the whale oil market . These Titusville wells were modest in output , but productive enough to permit Kier and dozens of others near him in Pittsburgh to expand their lighting fluid businesses .
Crude oil is a blend of hydrocarbon “ molecules ” of various weights — i . e ., heaviness — and evaporating temperatures . Distilling , or “ refining ,” of crude oil involves heating it to evolve a blend of gases and then cooling the gas stream at a temperature that will liquify that fraction of the gases of the desired weight . The lightestweight components , those that evaporate readily , could not be used as lighting fluid for lamps . Those that were not actually gases at room temperature , like the gases piped to streetlamps , were simply too light ( too volatile ) to keep from quickly evaporating in a table lamp . They were boiled off . The next to evaporate — what Gesner called kerosene — condensed at slightly higher temperatures and had just the right weight
Library of Congress www . MoAF . org | Winter 2021 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 33