by UMBERTO MAZZEI
“The oil industry…is, from an economic standpoint, a foreign province located in our territory”
Alberto Adriani, 1931
Until the late nineteenth century oil was used only for lamps and lubricants. Everything changed when, in Germany, Siegfried Marcus invented the combustion engine, Karl Benz’s assembled the first car that run on gasoline, and, in the United States, Henry Ford created, at Dearborn, his first prototypes. By the twentieth century dawn, oil moved transportation by land, sea and air.
The history of oil shows, up until the Second World War, a parade of colorful characters that shaped present oil partitions. Its history has material for several action movies, with two main actors: Standard Oil and Shell.
U.S. and Standard Oil
In 1859, Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania and started the first U.S. oil production. Ten years later, Titusville was the largest oil field in North America. Samuel Andrews – inspired by the German chemists Liebig and Karl Enger Giusto- began, in Cleveland, refining oil to make kerosene and other products. John D. Rockefeller came by and they associated. Henry Flagler showed up and they formed the Rockefeller, Flager &Andrews. The company expanded into oil transport and pushed for a transport cartel called Standard Oil Co. Due to contracts with Vanderbilt’s railroads, the use of pipelines and by dumping, in 1880 it controlled 95% of the oil trade in the U.S. Then it expanded to other markets and sources to reach universal coverage.
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