Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [35]
There was little place left for whale oil in such a world. Within a year of Drake's oil rig, kerosene had replaced it as the popular fuel. In truth, though, the northeastern American whaling fleet was already in decline by 1859. Although sperm whales had not become extinct, they had grown scarce by the latter part of the nineteenth century. Consequently, the hunt for them was more time-consuming, arduous, and costly. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, cautious northern merchants kept their ships tied up in port—it wasn't worth risking capture by Confederate cruisers—and after several years, the hulls of the whaling ships began to rot in the wharves. Once the war was under way, in an effort to blockade Charleston and Savannah harbors, the Union purchased forty old whalers, loaded them with stones, and sank them. When peace arrived in 1865, the fleet was a fraction of what it had been, and since a good share of their market had been lost to kerosene, most merchants chose not to replace their old vessels. The ships that did set out were obliged to take on more and more risk in order to fill their holds, sailing longer into the northern winter and escaping the freeze-up by increasingly narrow margins.
It was also true that the northeastern fleet, in an age of steam, had failed to modernize, which was essential, since the whaling grounds had shifted largely to the Arctic, where conditions for both seamen and ships were brutal. The rudders of sailing ships had to be kept free of ice, and in frigid conditions ice formed on the riggings, and the ships were in danger of capsizing from the weight. When, in the early winter of 1871, thirty-two ships became locked in Arctic ice—the crews surviving by making their way to vessels in open water—the loss of more ships meant that the hunt, for the northeastern fleet, was nearly finished.
Although animal fuel would not again feed more than an occasional lamp, demand for baleen and other products made from whale blubber—margarine, soap, lubricants—continued. Faster steam whalers that shipped out of San Francisco and northern Europe hunted species that could not have been captured under sail alone. Although the sperm whale had grown scarce, it was still hunted as well, for its oil retained its lubricating qualities in extreme temperatures. Sperm oil would grease the machines of the industrial age long after the last whale oil lamp went out. Prior to the 1982 international moratorium on whaling, sperm oil—harvested from a mammal that could dive to depths of more than four thousand feet, the deepest of all mammals—would lubricate the precision instruments on spacecraft.
For all its popularity, kerosene had some drawbacks. In the first decades of its manufacture, there was little regulation of the supply, and unscrupulous traders adulterated it with benzene or naphtha, which lowered the flash point and made it more volatile. The members of the Buffalo, New York, Board of Trade noted:
The country has been flooded with all sorts of compounds and mixtures and greases that pretend to do everything and accomplish nothing. In refined oils particularly, low-test oils and fluids have been thrown on the market by unprincipled men, with perfect impunity, throughout the country.... The inspector may do his duty, and brand