Rockefeller oil business
Epstein revisits the Standard Oil Trust controversy in this the th anniversary of the breakup of the Trust. Part I yesterday reviewed the flawed textbook interpretation of Rockefeller's accomplishment. The Standard story begins during the U. Civil War. In , the first railroad line was built connecting the city of Cleveland to the Oil Regions in Pennsylvania, where virtually all American oil came from.
Standard Oil Company
In , John D. Rockefeller, a resident of Cleveland Ohio, joined with two partners to establish an oil-refining company. The men purchased oil wells in Titusville, Pennsylvania, and constructed a well near Cleveland. In this year alone, the business earned approximately , dollars. While Rockefeller reaped extensive wealth in , the oil industry was just beginning to grow.
Most people only used oil for lighting. The market was limited. Prices fluctuated dramatically, as oil production waxed and waned during this period. To try and stabilize oil prices Rockefeller and Samuel Andrews, his partner, approached O. Payne, owner of the largest oil refinery in Cleveland. They proposed that the three men unite their companies together. By having a single oil company operating in northeastern Ohio, this company could hopefully fix prices and avoid the tremendous swings as production sometimes increased or dwindled.
The company organizers convinced numerous other Cleveland firms to join with them. In other cases, they bought out the companies or drove them out of business by selling their oil for a much cheaper price than their competitors could. In , Rockefeller united these companies together as the Standard Oil Company. During the s and s, Rockefeller sought to expand Standard Oil's influence. The company began to purchase or drive out of business oil refiners across the United States. By , Standard Oil purportedly controlled ninety percent of the oil refineries in the United States.
In essence, the Standard Oil Company created various companies across the United States that were purportedly their own entities. In reality, Rockefeller directed all of these businesses.
During the s and s, Rockefeller came under attack from the federal government for having created a virtual monopoly over the oil industry. In , John Sherman, a senator from Ohio, proposed an anti-trust act, authorizing the federal government to break up any businesses that prohibited competition.
The Standard Oil Trust effectively eliminated competition. In , Ohio's attorney general filed suit against Rockefeller and his company. While Ohio won the case, Standard Oil appealed the decision. In , the United States Supreme Court eventually ruled in this case that Standard Oil was a trust and had to cease to exist. The company then splintered into numerous subsidiaries.
In theory, these companies were no longer owned by a single person or operated by a single board of directors, but it appears that they still operated in conjunction with each other. Other companies used the Standard Oil name to profit off of the company's reputation, but these organizations were never part of the company formerly controlled by Rockefeller.
Standard Oil Company, also called Sohio, in effect, ceased to exist after being purchased by British Petroleum BP in , although BP continued to sell gasoline under the Sohio brand name until Toggle navigation. Jump to: navigation , search. John D. Rockefeller In , John D. See Also Ohio John D. Rockefeller Monopoly [ Strategies of John D.
Tarbell ] [ Wikipedia: Standard Oil ].
Standard Oil Co. Inc. was an American oil producing, transporting, refining, marketing company. Established in , by. Standard Oil was the first great business trust in the United States. Rockefeller revolutionized the.
John Davison Rockefeller Sr. July 8, — May 23, was an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is widely considered the wealthiest American of all time , [4] [5] and the richest person in modern history. Rockefeller was born into a large family in upstate New York that moved several times before eventually settling in Cleveland , Ohio.
Standard Oil Co. Established in , by John D.
At the age of 14, Ida Tarbell witnessed the Cleveland Massacre , in which dozens of small oil producers in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, including her father, were faced with a daunting choice that seemed to come out of nowhere: sell their businesses to the shrewd, confident 32 year-old John D. Rockefeller, Sr. She became one of the most influential muckrakers of the Gilded Age , helping to usher in that age of political, economic and industrial reform known as the Progressive Era.
The Woman Who Took on the Tycoon
In , John D. Rockefeller, a resident of Cleveland Ohio, joined with two partners to establish an oil-refining company. The men purchased oil wells in Titusville, Pennsylvania, and constructed a well near Cleveland. In this year alone, the business earned approximately , dollars. While Rockefeller reaped extensive wealth in , the oil industry was just beginning to grow.
Standard Oil
John D. Rockefeller July 8, —May 23, continues to rank as one of the richest men in modern times. He remains one of the great figures of Wall Street—reviled as a villain, applauded as an innovator, but universally recognized as one of the most powerful men in history. Rockefeller's father, William Avery Rockefeller, led a nomadic life selling goods across the country, while his mother raised the children. After his family eventually took root in Cleveland Ohio, Rockefeller received an unusually good education for his time, and found work as a commission house clerk at the age of Early on, Rockefeller keenly understood ways of managing risk. While he knew oil speculators could potentially reap huge profits if they hit a deposit, he also knew that they faced substantial financial loss, if they failed in that effort. For this reason, he strategically narrowed his focus to the refining business, where profits were smaller but more stable. And through robust research and development , he discovered ways to exploit the traditionally discarded oil by-products, by using them to create lubricants, paints, and other useful items. Rockefeller saw the cutthroat competition in the oil industry as a ruinous influence and began methodically stamping it out.
Part V tomorrow examines the unlearned lessons of the John D. In fact, the company struggled mightily in that decade to lower its prices even more—while facing its greatest competitive challenges foreign and domestic , as well as a bedeviling technological challenge.
A couple of weeks ago, we published an infographic showing how the list of the most valuable companies in the U. Near the top of that list in is The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, which is just one of the 34 forced spin-offs from the original Standard Oil juggernaut that was split up in At the turn of the 20th century, John D. As a result, an antitrust case was filed against the company in under the Sherman Antitrust Act, arguing that the company used tactics such as raising prices in areas where it had a monopoly, while price gouging in areas where it still faced competition.
The Real History of the Standard Oil Company - Part 2: The Beginning
A time-line chart showing the history of the companies derived from the Standard Oil Company from up to the present. Source: Rasoul Sorkhabi from various sources In , Rockefeller, aged 24, together with the Clark brothers and a chemist, Samuel Andrews, started an oil refinery in Cleveland, Ohio. The name Standard was chosen to imply the standardization of oil refineries and products. Indeed, the oil barrel of 42 gallons was a design of Standard Oil in Pennsylvania in the s; oil was stored in the wooden whiskey barrels and it was 40 plus 2 gallons per barrel because some oil was often lost during transportation. The rise and expansion of Standard Oil occurred after the Civil War and during a period in the American history which has been dubbed as the Gilded Age, popularized in Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley in in reference to the process of gilding an object with a superficial layer of gold. This was the period of rapid economic expansion, population growth, and rise of large enterprises and monopolies over oil, tobacco, steel, beef and railroads in the USA. Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Company in the broad rooms of Wall Street banks and investment houses, water their stock and rig the market. They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, and perhaps even more important, by ruthless, never slothful efficiency of organization and production. Nevertheless, during the s—s, Standard Oil absorbed many small and large oil companies and established regional companies across the USA. In , Rockefeller and partners further consolidated their dominance by transforming Standard Oil into a trust with nine trustees managing the corporation on behalf of all shareholders. In response to this, the Standard Oil Trust changed its name to the Standard Oil Interests, with 20 companies, and made some cosmetic adjustments — but still the central power remained with a holding company first in New York and then in New Jersey. Nevertheless, the —97 depression, which hurt the middle and lower-income classes, and the rise of an intellectual movement against trusts and monopolies pushed the politicians to curb the economic power of corporations. President Theodore Roosevelt from the Republican Party was one of the strongest political leaders who pushed for Progressive reforms.
J.D. Rockefeller: From Oil Baron to Billionaire
Part 1 is on John David Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and the richest person to ever live, not just in America, but in the history of the world. Although Standard Oil was eventually forced to break into multiple companies because it was ruled a monopoly, BP, Exxon, ConocoPhillips and Chevron among others are all subsidiaries of Standard Oil. NOTE: Want more? Rockefeller was completely self-made and had a combination of ruthless business tactics, strategic brilliance, and a passion for philanthropy, making him a complex individual that any wannabe business person can learn from. He had girlfriends in each city and even had children with a few of them, a fact that John tried to hide his entire life. When John was a child, William admitted to tricking him in hopes of making his son a tough businessman.
