At Home - Bill Bryson [65]
While others were failing and desperately trying to get out of the oil business, a small firm in Cleveland called Clark and Rockefeller, which normally dealt in pork and other farm commodities, decided to move in. It began buying up failed leases. By 1877, less than twenty years after the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania, Clark had vanished from the scene and John D. Rockefeller controlled some 90 percent of America’s oil business. Oil not only provided the raw material for an exceedingly lucrative form of illumination but also answered a desperate need for lubrication for all the engines and machinery of the new industrial age. Rockefeller’s virtual monopoly allowed him to keep prices stable and to grow fantastically rich in the process. By the closing years of the century, his personal wealth was increasing by about $1 billion a year, measured in today’s money—and this in an age without income taxes. No human being in modern times has been richer.
Bissell and his partners had more mixed fortunes, and at a decidedly more modest level. The Seneca Oil Company made money for a while, but in 1864, just five years after Drake’s drilling breakthrough, it could no longer compete and went out of business. Drake squandered the money he made and died soon after, penniless and crippled by neuralgia. Bissell did much better. He invested his earnings in a bank and other businesses, and accrued a small fortune—enough to build Dartmouth a handsome gymnasium, which still stands.
While kerosene was establishing itself as the illuminant of choice in millions of homes, particularly in small towns and rural areas, it was challenged in many larger communities by another wonder of the age: gas. For the well-to-do in many large cities, gas was an additional option from about 1820. Mostly, however, it was used in factories and shops and for street lighting, and didn’t become common in homes till closer to the middle of the century.
Gas had many drawbacks. Those who worked in gas-supplied offices or visited gaslit theaters often complained of headaches and nausea. To minimize that problem, gaslights were sometimes erected outside factory windows. Indoors, gas blackened ceilings, discolored fabrics, corroded metal, and left a greasy layer of soot on every horizontal surface. Flowers wilted swiftly in its presence, and most plants turned yellow unless isolated in a terrarium. Only the aspidistra seemed immune to its ill effects, which accounts for its presence in nearly every Victorian parlor photograph. Gas also needed some care in use. Most gas-supply companies reduced gas flow through their pipes during the day when demand was low. So anyone lighting a gas jet during the day had to open the tap wide to get a decent light. But as the pressure was stepped up later in the day, the light could flare dangerously, scorching ceilings or even starting fires, wherever someone had forgotten to turn down the tap. So gas was dangerous as well as dirty.
Gas had one irresistible advantage, however. It was bright—at least compared with anything else the pre-electric world knew. The average room with gas was twenty times brighter than it had been before. It wasn’t an intimate light—you couldn’t move it nearer your book or sewing as you could a table lamp—but it provided wonderful overall illumination. It made reading, card playing, and even conversing more agreeable. Diners could see the condition of their food;