Post by Catsmate on Aug 3, 2019 13:12:19 GMT
The Petroleum Age with all it's associated benefits and troubles can reasonable be dated to begin in 1901, specifically around 10:30AM 10 January, on a hilltop in the US state of Texas and the dream of a Austro-Hungarian engineer who specialised in salt mining named Antun Lučić or Anthony Lucas.
Before the exploitation of Spindletop Hill (by the wonderfully named Gladys City Oil, Gas, and Manufacturing Company) oil wasn't competitive with alcohol[1] fuels on price (running 5.8 cents/litre compared to 3.6 cents for corn produced ethanol) and there were other factors holding back it's large scale use such as the perceived cleanliness of alcohol[2] and the Standard Oil Trust.
Standard Oil was a giant, ruthless, monopoly which controlled most of the US oil industry in the early twentieth century controlled, openly or through intermediates, by John D. Rockefeller. The company used all tactics available, legal and not, to maintain and expand it's control of the oil business.
In 1911 the US Supreme Court ruled it an illegal monopoly.
Back in the 1890s ethanol/methanol fuelled engines were in common use in farm machinery in Europe, something that made countries almost fuel independent. There was extensive research in Germany and France into alcohol and blended hydrocarbon/alcohol fuels; when the first automobiles were developed those in Europe often operated on alcohol fuels.
In 1899 the German government taxed petroleum imports and subsidized domestic ethanol specifically to promote domestic fuel sources over imported (i.e. Oil Trust) hydrocarbons; Wilhelm II sponsored research into the use of alcohol as a fuel.
This spread to France within a couple of years; in fact Paris had an exposition dedicated entirely to the uses of alcohol as a fuel in 1902 (the Congress des Applications de L'Alcool Denature which ran from 16-23 December and featured cars, farm machinery, lamps, stoves, heaters, clothes irons,and many other appliances fuelled by ethanol). The exposition toured Europe and visited the USA a few years later. Under Teddy Roosevelt, in 1906, the US passed the Free Alcohol Act eliminated most alcohol taxes and exempted far stills from government oversight, specifically to undermine Standard Oil.
However the era of alcohol was to end when the first 'gusher' on Lucas Hill sprayed crude oil thirty metres into the air and continued for nine days until it was capped. Within a year the crude oil, before being separated into it's various constituent fractions, reached a price of 3 cents per barrel (about 160 litres).
The story of Spindletop started many years earlier[3]. The 'hill' was merely a tree covered slight rise in the ground a little south of the then town of Beaumont.
While the knowledge of oil deposits in the area dated back centuries (to the Spanish use of oil seeps as a source of caulk in the mid sixteenth century and later use of seeping oil as a source of lubricants) the first significant interest was in 1847 when settlers at nearby Sour Lake noticed oil bubbling to the surface.
Immediately after the US Civil War in 1965 a man named Dick Dowling tried unsuccessfully to drill an oil well near the lake and one George Washington O’Brien became interested in possible oil under Spindletop Hill. He would later (in 1888) purchased about a thousand acres of land there. Likewise in 1889 a local man named Pattillo Higgins, with no formal training or education in geology, came to believe that the hill and the salt deposits under it covered a huge deposit of oil.
Exploration began in 1893, after O’Brien, Higgins and another man named George W. Carrol pooled their interested and created the Gladys City Oil, Gas and Manufacturing Company, but drilling was uniformly unsuccessful.
The Gladys City Company tried again in 1895 and in 1896, failing each time mainly due to lack of proper equipment and expertise. Higgins left the company in 1895 and the other partners began to lose faith in the project. Higgins became known jokingly as "The Millionaire" locally.
This is where Lucas comes in. He's moved to the US and been naturalised in the 1880s and worked mainly in mining and salt exploration. At the time he heard of Spindletop Hill in 1889, Lucas was in Louisiana working for a salt mining company. His years of working in the salt business had convinced him of a link between the salt deposits and sulphur and crude oil, in the Gulf Coast sediments. This was not generally accepted by geologists.
When Lucas travelled to Beaumont he was convinced that there was a oil under Spindletop. So he leased land from the Gladys City and began exploratory drilling.
Like all the previous attempts this failed.
Lucas was ready to quit and return to salt mining until his wife persuaded him to seek outside funding and continue drilling. Lucas went to see Rockefeller, who refused to become involved, and later to a pair of oil prospectors named James Guffey and John Galey. Together the three men approached the banker and industrialist Andrew Mellon for financing to continue operations. With the money now available the trio hired Al and Curt Hamill an expert drilling team.
For the next four months the failures continued, though the rotary drills cut down to a depth of more than 300 metres. When drilling recommenced, after the Christmas holiday, the drill became stuck in a crevice about 320 metres below ground.
While the brothers Hamill were trying to free the drill the soon-to-be-famous Lucas Gusher erupted, spraying oil for hundreds of metres.
It was the greatest oil well ever seen, with around 100,000 barrels flowing out daily. Overnight thousands of sightseers, speculators, promoters, fortune seekers, con-artists and "boomers" poured into Beaumont as news of the discovery spread round the USA and the world.
Several concentrations of buildings sprang up on Spindletop Hill. Within a year-and-a-half 285 oil wells were active on Spindletop and six hundred oil companies had been chartered (most failed; many were outright frauds) and some survive today. ABout a quarter-of-a-billion dollars was invested.
While the deposits at Spindletop were actually quite small and were mostly played out by 1905 it stimulated exploration elsewhere in Texas and triggered an explosive boom in oil production in the state, which would increase twenty fold from 1900 to 1902.
The Petroleum Age, of cheap, plentiful, lightweight fuel began on that hill. It brought us unparalleled mobility, a truly global world, mechanised warfare, global climate change and more.
What if it hadn't happened?
Adventure uses.
1. The simplest and most direct method to use this concept in a game is to drop the PCs into a changed modern day. The oil boom happened later, and blended (alcohol/hydrocarbon mix) fuels didn't lose out as much. The effects of a later mass use of oil are immense, slowed mechanisation and industrialisation perhaps. Changes in geo-poltics (remember Churchill and the Anglo-persian Oil Company) especially in the Middle East. A different outcome to World War One and the cascading changes from that.
So now the PCs have to go back and Put Right What Once Went Wrong. Possibly a painful duty if the modern day is notably better in some ways to the one the PCs knows.
So what did happen? Did someone intentionally go back to build a better future by meddling in oil? Was it the consequence of someone one of the party (or another time traveller) did earlier in the timeline? (Who irritated Andrew Mellon before he met Lucas and company?)
2. A really direct approach, and in classic Who tradition, is to dump the PCs into the action. Have them arrive, deliberately or otherwise, in Beaumont just before the historical date of the strike. Maybe Sixie is trying to show Peri part of her country's history (and make a point about fossil fuel use). Maybe Seven is scheming deviously and Ace has a job to do. Maybe Five has missed eighties London again...
So what's happening? Do they discover the plan of some Time Meddler to alter Earth's history (the parallels with The Mark of the Rani are obvious).
Now you have to fix it. Another possible red herring is the prospect of time traveling tourists and/or researchers here to see a new age begin.
3. Then again the possibilities of Spindletop Hill might appeal to a time traveller as a potential opportunity to insert themselves into a position of power and wealth in early twentieth century America. Some advanced technology, a little mind control, some well managed assassinations and a chunk of stolen/salvaged gold to fund operations. The meddler could be:
I mentioned the novel The Assassin earlier. It's one of a series of what might be called Edwardian techno-thrillers (lower tech) with a detective protagonist named Isaac Bell. An excellent source of ideas, background and characters (real and fictional) for use in a campaign set in the era. As might happen if some time machines are sabotaged or stolen...
Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?
[1] I'm going to use 'alcohol' generically for ethanol (ethyl or grain alcohol, C2H5OH) and methanol (methyl or wood alcohol, CH3OH). While there was interest in heavier alcohols, such as butanol (C4H9OH), the mass production of these as fuels wasn't nearly as common.
[2] "In regard to general cleanliness, such as absence of smoke and disagreeable odors, alcohol has many advantages over gasoline or kerosene as a fuel… The exhaust from an alcohol engine is never clouded with a black or grayish smoke". US Geological Survey
[3] About 145 million...
Before the exploitation of Spindletop Hill (by the wonderfully named Gladys City Oil, Gas, and Manufacturing Company) oil wasn't competitive with alcohol[1] fuels on price (running 5.8 cents/litre compared to 3.6 cents for corn produced ethanol) and there were other factors holding back it's large scale use such as the perceived cleanliness of alcohol[2] and the Standard Oil Trust.
Standard Oil was a giant, ruthless, monopoly which controlled most of the US oil industry in the early twentieth century controlled, openly or through intermediates, by John D. Rockefeller. The company used all tactics available, legal and not, to maintain and expand it's control of the oil business.
In 1911 the US Supreme Court ruled it an illegal monopoly.
- The 'Clive Cussler' novel The Assassin is set in 1905 in and around Rockefeller and the oil trust. It provides a wealth of background information and many characters worth 'borrowing' for gaming.
Back in the 1890s ethanol/methanol fuelled engines were in common use in farm machinery in Europe, something that made countries almost fuel independent. There was extensive research in Germany and France into alcohol and blended hydrocarbon/alcohol fuels; when the first automobiles were developed those in Europe often operated on alcohol fuels.
In 1899 the German government taxed petroleum imports and subsidized domestic ethanol specifically to promote domestic fuel sources over imported (i.e. Oil Trust) hydrocarbons; Wilhelm II sponsored research into the use of alcohol as a fuel.
This spread to France within a couple of years; in fact Paris had an exposition dedicated entirely to the uses of alcohol as a fuel in 1902 (the Congress des Applications de L'Alcool Denature which ran from 16-23 December and featured cars, farm machinery, lamps, stoves, heaters, clothes irons,and many other appliances fuelled by ethanol). The exposition toured Europe and visited the USA a few years later. Under Teddy Roosevelt, in 1906, the US passed the Free Alcohol Act eliminated most alcohol taxes and exempted far stills from government oversight, specifically to undermine Standard Oil.
However the era of alcohol was to end when the first 'gusher' on Lucas Hill sprayed crude oil thirty metres into the air and continued for nine days until it was capped. Within a year the crude oil, before being separated into it's various constituent fractions, reached a price of 3 cents per barrel (about 160 litres).
The story of Spindletop started many years earlier[3]. The 'hill' was merely a tree covered slight rise in the ground a little south of the then town of Beaumont.
- The name is interesting, possibly due to distortions in the air (caused by warm air rising from the surrounding grassland) giving the trees the illusion of moving. Also interesting is the history of ghost stories associated with Spindletop Hill., including frequent outbreaks of St. Elmo's fire, a form of static electricity.
While the knowledge of oil deposits in the area dated back centuries (to the Spanish use of oil seeps as a source of caulk in the mid sixteenth century and later use of seeping oil as a source of lubricants) the first significant interest was in 1847 when settlers at nearby Sour Lake noticed oil bubbling to the surface.
Immediately after the US Civil War in 1965 a man named Dick Dowling tried unsuccessfully to drill an oil well near the lake and one George Washington O’Brien became interested in possible oil under Spindletop Hill. He would later (in 1888) purchased about a thousand acres of land there. Likewise in 1889 a local man named Pattillo Higgins, with no formal training or education in geology, came to believe that the hill and the salt deposits under it covered a huge deposit of oil.
Exploration began in 1893, after O’Brien, Higgins and another man named George W. Carrol pooled their interested and created the Gladys City Oil, Gas and Manufacturing Company, but drilling was uniformly unsuccessful.
- Their rather vague plan was to find oil and use it to develop a model industrial city called Gladys City. Higgins named the town and the company for his Sunday school pupil, Gladys Bingham.
The Gladys City Company tried again in 1895 and in 1896, failing each time mainly due to lack of proper equipment and expertise. Higgins left the company in 1895 and the other partners began to lose faith in the project. Higgins became known jokingly as "The Millionaire" locally.
This is where Lucas comes in. He's moved to the US and been naturalised in the 1880s and worked mainly in mining and salt exploration. At the time he heard of Spindletop Hill in 1889, Lucas was in Louisiana working for a salt mining company. His years of working in the salt business had convinced him of a link between the salt deposits and sulphur and crude oil, in the Gulf Coast sediments. This was not generally accepted by geologists.
When Lucas travelled to Beaumont he was convinced that there was a oil under Spindletop. So he leased land from the Gladys City and began exploratory drilling.
Like all the previous attempts this failed.
Lucas was ready to quit and return to salt mining until his wife persuaded him to seek outside funding and continue drilling. Lucas went to see Rockefeller, who refused to become involved, and later to a pair of oil prospectors named James Guffey and John Galey. Together the three men approached the banker and industrialist Andrew Mellon for financing to continue operations. With the money now available the trio hired Al and Curt Hamill an expert drilling team.
For the next four months the failures continued, though the rotary drills cut down to a depth of more than 300 metres. When drilling recommenced, after the Christmas holiday, the drill became stuck in a crevice about 320 metres below ground.
While the brothers Hamill were trying to free the drill the soon-to-be-famous Lucas Gusher erupted, spraying oil for hundreds of metres.
It was the greatest oil well ever seen, with around 100,000 barrels flowing out daily. Overnight thousands of sightseers, speculators, promoters, fortune seekers, con-artists and "boomers" poured into Beaumont as news of the discovery spread round the USA and the world.
Several concentrations of buildings sprang up on Spindletop Hill. Within a year-and-a-half 285 oil wells were active on Spindletop and six hundred oil companies had been chartered (most failed; many were outright frauds) and some survive today. ABout a quarter-of-a-billion dollars was invested.
While the deposits at Spindletop were actually quite small and were mostly played out by 1905 it stimulated exploration elsewhere in Texas and triggered an explosive boom in oil production in the state, which would increase twenty fold from 1900 to 1902.
The Petroleum Age, of cheap, plentiful, lightweight fuel began on that hill. It brought us unparalleled mobility, a truly global world, mechanised warfare, global climate change and more.
What if it hadn't happened?
Adventure uses.
1. The simplest and most direct method to use this concept in a game is to drop the PCs into a changed modern day. The oil boom happened later, and blended (alcohol/hydrocarbon mix) fuels didn't lose out as much. The effects of a later mass use of oil are immense, slowed mechanisation and industrialisation perhaps. Changes in geo-poltics (remember Churchill and the Anglo-persian Oil Company) especially in the Middle East. A different outcome to World War One and the cascading changes from that.
So now the PCs have to go back and Put Right What Once Went Wrong. Possibly a painful duty if the modern day is notably better in some ways to the one the PCs knows.
So what did happen? Did someone intentionally go back to build a better future by meddling in oil? Was it the consequence of someone one of the party (or another time traveller) did earlier in the timeline? (Who irritated Andrew Mellon before he met Lucas and company?)
2. A really direct approach, and in classic Who tradition, is to dump the PCs into the action. Have them arrive, deliberately or otherwise, in Beaumont just before the historical date of the strike. Maybe Sixie is trying to show Peri part of her country's history (and make a point about fossil fuel use). Maybe Seven is scheming deviously and Ace has a job to do. Maybe Five has missed eighties London again...
So what's happening? Do they discover the plan of some Time Meddler to alter Earth's history (the parallels with The Mark of the Rani are obvious).
- Too obvious. Hence she'd make a wonderful red herring. She's carefully not meddling in history, just setting to shop to begin exploiting the supply of human experimental subjects that the oil boom will lure to Beaumont. Perfect for an uneasy and fractious alliance...
Now you have to fix it. Another possible red herring is the prospect of time traveling tourists and/or researchers here to see a new age begin.
- One of my To Do items is a version of The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang crossed over with the webcomic Questionable Content but with Cupcake replaced by a pair of not-exactly-teenagers from the far future (resembling Cher and Dion from Clueless) in a 'borrowed' time machine who go travelling. Somehow they fit into this perfectly....
3. Then again the possibilities of Spindletop Hill might appeal to a time traveller as a potential opportunity to insert themselves into a position of power and wealth in early twentieth century America. Some advanced technology, a little mind control, some well managed assassinations and a chunk of stolen/salvaged gold to fund operations. The meddler could be:
- A Temporally Displaced Person. Accidentally dropped back in time with limited resources (what's in him/her pockets?) but drive and ambition (and a knowledge of history, whether innate or via a smartphone/tablet loaded with books)
- A dedicated Meddler with a plan and resources. It could be Mortimus, someone who stumbled over a time machine or portal. Either way they have a well thought out plan and the resources and determination to carry it out. If frustrated this time they may become a recurring antagonist.
- An intermediate situation. A person who's acquired a time machine and now finds themselves stranded in early twentieth
century America and decides to intervene. Limited resources, no working time machine for a quick exit and no real plan.
I mentioned the novel The Assassin earlier. It's one of a series of what might be called Edwardian techno-thrillers (lower tech) with a detective protagonist named Isaac Bell. An excellent source of ideas, background and characters (real and fictional) for use in a campaign set in the era. As might happen if some time machines are sabotaged or stolen...
Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?
[1] I'm going to use 'alcohol' generically for ethanol (ethyl or grain alcohol, C2H5OH) and methanol (methyl or wood alcohol, CH3OH). While there was interest in heavier alcohols, such as butanol (C4H9OH), the mass production of these as fuels wasn't nearly as common.
[2] "In regard to general cleanliness, such as absence of smoke and disagreeable odors, alcohol has many advantages over gasoline or kerosene as a fuel… The exhaust from an alcohol engine is never clouded with a black or grayish smoke". US Geological Survey
[3] About 145 million...