Heat (24 page)

During the boom, 250 scows could take advantage of a single freshet to float them and propel them down Oil Creek and French Creek to the Allegheny. The voyage from the oil wells to Pittsburgh required three or four days. Occasionally a scow caught fire. A burning scow, tied to a riverbank, could not be allowed to ignite the storage tanks or the wells themselves. A burning scow would be cut loose. Adrift, it would encounter other scows, igniting their contents. As the barrels burned, oil drained into the water, where it floated and continued to burn. In such a fire, the bridge at the town of Franklin burned. The town of Rouseville lost twenty-seven citizens to flames that drifted in from upstream.

I paddle down French Creek and into the Allegheny River and on to Franklin. My canoe carries no petroleum, if one ignores its hull, which itself is petroleum, converted to plastic and molded in a shape that a Cornplanter Indian would immediately recognize.

Farther downstream and in the harbors of the East Coast, it was a small leap from scows with barrels to ships with barrels. In the same year that William Wright visited Petrolia, the sailing brig
Elizabeth Watts
took a shipment of crude oil across the ocean, departing Philadelphia on November 19, 1861, and arriving in London forty-five days later. The square-rigged ship carried her product in 1,329 wooden barrels—901 holding crude oil straight from the well, the remainder holding kerosene. The rich smell of petroleum and the fear of a fire at sea necessitated creative recruiting, the picking up of drunken sailors who would not awaken to their decision until they were on board, shanghaied.

A year later, Philadelphia had exported 239,000 barrels, all of it in wooden barrels originally designed to move whiskey, each holding about forty gallons.

Shippers experimented. They used purpose-built barrels. They fabricated upright iron tanks and tin-lined wooden boxes in cargo holds. The tanker evolved. Seventeen years after the
Elizabeth Watts
sailed from Philadelphia, in the new oilfields that had sprung up on the shores of the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan, Ludvig and Robert Nobel, brothers of the inventor of dynamite, came up with a tanker design that relied on two iron reservoirs connected by pipes. Their ship is often considered a breakthrough in tanker design, a step toward vessels that carry the cargo within their hull, turning the ships themselves into massive barrels of crude. And their ship was steam powered, a vessel reliant on heat and fire for propulsion loaded with a highly flammable fuel.

The Nobel brothers, somewhat famously, and in the footsteps of Benjamin Franklin, chose not to patent their design.

The name of the first Nobel tanker: the
Zoroaster.

The fate of the
Zoroaster
is unknown, but the fate of her sister ship, the
Nordenskjöld,
is well documented. In 1881 the
Nordenskjöld
was taking on cargo. A loading hose leaked, sending its fluid contents into the engine compartment. There the fluid encountered kerosene lamps and ignited, killing half the crew.

Pipelines, it was realized, could replace teamsters. The cruel treatment of horses and the high price of moving barrels in horse-drawn wagons could be put to rest. The first oil pipeline was built near Titusville in 1863, two years after the
Elizabeth Watts
sailed. It was a cast-iron line with a two-inch diameter and a length of two miles, joining an Oil Creek well to the Humboldt Refinery in Plumer. Pumps pushed the oil through the pipe. The pumps proved inadequate. A second line was built, also of cast iron, but with a three-inch diameter and a length of three miles. The pumps forced the oil through in sudden spurts. The spurts caused vibrations. Pipeline joints leaked. The line failed.

Teamsters continued to apply the lash.

Later pipelines proved more successful. A two-inch line took refined product two miles to the Allegheny River, where it was loaded onto barges and sent downstream. Another two-inch line carried oil for five miles. A six-inch line, seven miles in length, carried more than seven thousand barrels a day by 1865.

The lash of the teamsters fell with less confidence.

By 1866, the teamsters were losing business to pipelines. The teamsters applied their whips, in the form of arson, to the property of pipeline owners. It started with the burning of two tanks, but the fire was contained. The next day a mob of teamsters gathered. The
Titusville Herald
of April 21, 1866, reported that the mob of teamsters numbered close to one hundred men. They were armed. They moved in.

The owner of the tanks had hired watchmen. The teamsters, according to the
Titusville Herald
, discharged a weapon or weapons. The watchmen fired back.

In the midst of the gunplay, a teamster ignited a storage tank. Another tank caught fire, and another. Five burned. As they burned, they leaked oil. The oil, running across the ground, carried the fire to a railroad platform, which itself burned. Railroad ties caught fire. Four cars rigged to carry oil burned. Four hundred and fifty barrels, awaiting loading, burned. Sixty feet of steel track warped in the heat.

The tanks were replaced. The rails were repaired. The
Titusville Herald
reported that the operation was up and running again within twenty-four hours. Armed patrols protected the pipelines and the tanks.

Over the objections of the teamsters, pipelines proliferated. Pipelines delivered energy at the lowest possible cost. The profit motive sent pipelines from wells to refineries to markets. In 1919, fifty years after the teamster riots in Titusville, the
National Geographic
published an article about the wonders of the oil age. The article did not mention teamsters. It did mention pipelines, claiming that their cumulative length in the United States could circle the equator and continue for another five thousand miles.

In 1864, two years before the teamster riots, the U.S. Navy rejected the use of oil as fuel for ships. From a navy report: “The further development of this important substance as a fuel has been prevented by the discovery that when exposed to the air of a confined space at summer temperature, it gives off, even through the open bunghole of a barrel, a gas which, when mixed with the atmospheric air, becomes explosive and detonates with the force of a gunpowder.”

Three years later, the navy again considered oil as fuel. From another navy report: “Other things equal, the heat generated by the combustion of one pound of crude petroleum vaporizes 52 percent more water than that generated by the combustion of one pound of the combustible portion of anthracite.” Burning oil also required less manpower and freed shovelers of coal for other work.

“The petroleum fire starts into full activity instantaneously,” the report stated, “and is as instantaneously extinguished, while the coal fire requires about an hour to attain steady action and as long to burn out.” But oil, on a weight-for-weight basis, cost four times as much as coal. And it tended to evaporate before it could be used. The report concluded: “Convenience is against it, comfort is against it, health is against it, economy is against it, and safety is against it.” So there was no place in the navy for oil.

But in the same year, 1867, the
New York Times
ran three stories describing navy trials. A navy tug named the
Palos
could reach eight knots under coal power. She was retrofitted with two iron tanks full of petroleum. Pipes fed the petroleum to a boiler. Her top speed exceeded fourteen knots. She burned two barrels per hour.

Speed in navy ships wins battles. Speeches were made welcoming the coming of oil to naval warfare.

Over time, oil replaced coal. In 1920, from the secretary of the navy: “No coal burner can fight an oil burner on anything like equal terms.” And even more adamantly: “Oil is the very life of sea fighting.”

By 1867, oil was used experimentally in locomotives. Also in 1867, petroleum replaced coal in a fire engine in Boston. When the oil-fired steam-
​powered
fire engine was called into service, it raised a hundred pounds of steam within minutes and averaged ninety pounds of steam for the six hours that it was in action, fighting a fire. It worked side by side with coal-fired steam-powered fire engines. A reporter describing the scene commented on smoke coming from the fire engines: “While the streets leading to the fire were choked up with smoke thrown off by other steamers, scarcely any smoke came from No. 3, using the new fuel.”

The engines burned oil, but they burned it in fireboxes that heated water. Steam pushed pistons and turned cranks. They were external combustion engines, and they burned crude oil itself, or kerosene.

Refiners continued to throw away a useless and dangerous by-product called gasoline.

An internal combustion engine burns fuel inside its cylinders. The burning of its fuel, the rapid expansion that comes from sudden ignition, pushes pistons outward, converting heat to motion. Water does not act as an intermediary.

One of the first internal combustion engines was designed by the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens in 1678. The Huygens engine was designed to lift water. Its fuel: gunpowder.

By the 1800s, internal combustion engines were exciting inventors. They burned hydrogen and coal gas and kerosene. In 1876 the German Nicolaus Otto used a four-stroke internal combustion engine to power a two-wheel vehicle, a motorcycle. In 1885 another German, Karl Benz, added a wheel and built the first three-wheel internal-combustion-driven car. Also in 1885, yet another German and an associate of Otto’s, Gottlieb Daimler, improved the engine. In 1886 Daimler attached the engine to a stagecoach, creating a gasoline-powered motorcar. It had to compete for road space with horse-drawn carriages, but also with steam-powered cars and electrical cars.

In 1893 a gasoline-powered car showed up in America. Its first drive on a public road was on September 21, in Massachusetts. Three years later, Henry Ford sold his first car. By 1919 Americans drove six million cars. Gasoline was no longer thrown away. It had become something of a necessity. It was sold at every crossroads.

From the author of
National Geographic
’s 1919 article on the wonders of the oil age: “In those earlier days the oil refiner put as much gasoline in his kerosene product as the traffic would allow; today the automobilist complains that his gasoline contains too much kerosene.”

National Geographic
’s author worried about fuel shortages. “Where will my children and children’s children get the oil that they may need in ever increasing amounts?” he asked. He speculated about alcohol as a fuel. The alcohol could be made from crops, but it would tie up cropland. He pointed out the importance of coal, and its limitations. “Are there no practical substitutes or other adequate sources?” he wrote. “The obvious answer is in terms of present prices; the real answer is in terms of cost in man power.”

I fly home to Alaska, propelled by jet fuel. Another name for jet fuel: kerosene. My seat, propelled by burning kerosene, releases 1,537 pounds of carbon emissions.

Alaska, the nation’s coldest state, generates income by selling heat. That heat takes the form of oil, piped eight hundred miles from something like two thousand wells north of the Arctic Circle through a single pipeline to Valdez, on Alaska’s southeastern coast. From that single pipeline, the liquid heat goes into tankers. The tankers, for the most part, go to California and Washington. There the heat becomes motion—the motion of snarled traffic, of spinning turbines. In exchange, Alaska receives money. Eight of every ten dollars in Alaska come through that pipeline.