John Davison Rockefeller Essay
John Davison Rockefeller was born on July 8, 1839 in Richford, New York. At the age of sixteen Rockefeller was hired for his first job as an assistant bookkeeper. Continuing his hardworking mentality, at age twenty Rockefeller went into a business partnership with Maurice B. Clark and his brothers. Rockefeller and his brother William, partnered with Samuel Andrews and founded the oil company Rockefeller & Andrews. Rather than concentrating on the drilling of oil, Rockefeller focused more on refining it. In 1867, Henry Flagler entered the partnership. The Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler Company grew by incorporating local refineries. In 1870, Rockefeller and his associates incorporated the Standard Oil Company, which immediately prospered, thanks to favorable
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His horses delivered blue barrels of oil throughout America’s cities and had become symbols of excellence and efficiency. Consumers were not only choosing Standard Oil over that of his competitors; they also preferred it to coal oil, whale oil, and initially electricity. Millions of Americans illuminated their homes with kerosene from Standard Oil for one cent per hour. The discovery of large quantities of crude oil in northwest Pennsylvania soon changed the lives of millions of Americans. For centuries, people had known of the existence of crude oil scattered about America and the world. They just didn’t know what to do with it. Farmers thought it a nuisance and tried to plow around it; others bottled it and sold it as medicine. In 1855, Benjamin Silliman, Jr., a professor of chemistry at Yale, analyzed a batch of crude oil. After distilling and purifying it, he found that it yielded kerosene—a better illuminant than the popular whale oil. Other by-products of distilling included lubricating oil, gasoline, and paraffin, which made excellent candles. The need to find a market for one of these byproducts, gasoline led to one of the greatest partnerships of all time, that of Rockefeller and
His horses delivered blue barrels of oil throughout America’s cities and had become symbols of excellence and efficiency. Consumers were not only choosing Standard Oil over that of his competitors; they also preferred it to coal oil, whale oil, and initially electricity. Millions of Americans illuminated their homes with kerosene from Standard Oil for one cent per hour. The discovery of large quantities of crude oil in northwest Pennsylvania soon changed the lives of millions of Americans. For centuries, people had known of the existence of crude oil scattered about America and the world. They just didn’t know what to do with it. Farmers thought it a nuisance and tried to plow around it; others bottled it and sold it as medicine. In 1855, Benjamin Silliman, Jr., a professor of chemistry at Yale, analyzed a batch of crude oil. After distilling and purifying it, he found that it yielded kerosene—a better illuminant than the popular whale oil. Other by-products of distilling included lubricating oil, gasoline, and paraffin, which made excellent candles. The need to find a market for one of these byproducts, gasoline led to one of the greatest partnerships of all time, that of Rockefeller and