A Whale of a Tale: How Oil Changed the World

Yesterday, we looked at the rare earth minerals buried beneath our feet and the growing appetite for the riches they contain. Today, we're going to sea.

Not for minerals this time, but for a creature that had the misfortune to be swimming around long before mankind discovered just how useful it could be.

I've often pondered why mankind decided to go after the humble whale. After all, the whale was out there in the ocean, minding his or her own business and not causing anyone much trouble. Unless you happened to be a seal, krill or plankton. In which case, you might have had a civil rights claim or two.

Yet these gentle giants weren't bothering us. They were doing what whales had done since God first had a great idea: "I think I'll make a whale."

And the whales just cruised around, having babies, blowing bubbles, migrating to warmer places and generally enjoying a whale of a time.

Unfortunately, mankind had other ideas.

So what did the poor whale do to us? Well, let me tell you a whale of a tale about greed, ingenuity, a rather remarkable change in technology, and how the Industrial Revolution helped change the whale's fortunes.

When a whale was worth its weight in oil

Long before petroleum became the lifeblood of modern industry, whale oil was a highly prized commodity.

For centuries, people had used whale products for lighting, heating, cooking and other everyday purposes. Indigenous peoples in Arctic regions had their own established whaling traditions, using the animals for food, materials and fuel. The Inuit, for example, used whale oil in their traditional stone lamps, known as qulliq, which provided light and heat in a harsh environment.

These communities were not the beginning of some new industrial craze. They had developed ways of living with their surroundings and making use of the resources available to them.

The situation changed when commercial whaling expanded and demand grew far beyond local needs.

By the Middle Ages, Basque whalers were operating commercially in European waters, hunting whales for their blubber. As European seafaring developed, whaling spread farther afield. By the 18th and 19th centuries, fleets were venturing across the oceans in pursuit of their valuable cargo.

And what a cargo it was.

Whale blubber could be rendered down to produce oil that burned well in lamps and served as a lubricant for machinery. Before the widespread availability of petroleum products, that made it particularly valuable.

Certain whales also provided spermaceti, a waxy substance obtained from the head cavity of sperm whales. It was prized for producing candles that burned with a bright, relatively clean flame.

Then there was baleen.

music from Redhead and voice of her late husband. 

Baleen whales have plates hanging from their upper jaws that they use to filter food from seawater. These flexible, strong plates were once called whalebone, despite not being bone at all.

And what did humans do with them?

They put them in corsets, skirt hoops, umbrella ribs and a variety of other manufactured goods. Fashion, it seems, has never been particularly fussy about where its raw materials come from.

The whale had become a floating collection of useful commodities.

And where there is a valuable commodity, you can generally find somebody prepared to organise an industry around it.

The business of hunting whales

Commercial whaling was no Sunday afternoon fishing trip.

Whaling ships could spend months or even years at sea. Crews endured dangerous conditions, uncertain weather and the very real possibility of injury or death.

When a whale was caught, the work was brutal and physically demanding. The carcass was secured alongside the ship, the blubber stripped away and cut into pieces, and the fat heated in large iron pots ( trypots)  to extract the oil.

By the middle of the 19th century, this processing was often carried out aboard the whaling vessel itself.

Imagine spending days working on a ship's deck surrounded by hot oil, smoke and the unmistakable smell of rendered blubber. It was hardly the sort of working environment that would attract a glowing review from the occupational health and safety inspector or in fact from a buxom wench in the next port of call. 

Yet the rewards could be substantial.

Whale oil lit homes, workshops and businesses. It lubricated machinery. Whale products supplied manufacturers with materials that were difficult to obtain elsewhere.

Whaling had become big business.

And, as so often happens when an industry becomes profitable, the appetite for more grew.

The whales were no longer simply part of the natural world. They were an economic resource.

When the lights stayed on

One of the biggest drivers of the whale-oil trade was something we now take almost entirely for granted: artificial light.

Before electricity became commonplace, people relied on candles, lamps and other sources of illumination. Whale oil was particularly useful, and the finest oils and spermaceti candles were prized for their performance.

Think about that for a moment.

The ability to light a room after sunset changed the way people lived and worked. Factories could operate for longer hours. Shops and businesses could remain active after dark. Homes could be illuminated without relying solely on daylight or the more variable light of ordinary candles.

The Industrial Revolution was creating new machinery, new businesses and new demands for energy. Whale oil was one of the resources helping to meet those demands.

But it came at a price.

Whales reproduced slowly, and the increasing pressure from commercial hunting placed some populations under serious strain. As accessible whales became harder to find, voyages became longer and the costs of obtaining oil increased.

The industry was, in part, creating its own problem. The more valuable whale products became, the more incentive there was to find and hunt more whales.

It was a profitable business, but it was never going to be an inexhaustible one.

And then something else began to change.

Enter the man with a different idea

In the 1840s, a Canadian geologist and inventor named Abraham Gesner developed a process for producing a liquid fuel from coal and other carbon-rich materials.

He called his product kerosene.

Gesner's work helped establish the commercial use of a fuel that could provide practical, economical lighting. Kerosene could be produced from coal and, increasingly, from petroleum as the oil industry developed.

It was not the first alternative to whale oil. Coal gas, other animal fats and vegetable oils had already competed for a place in the lighting market.

But kerosene was to prove particularly important.

The discovery and commercial development of petroleum deposits gave the new fuel an enormous advantage. In 1859, Edwin Drake's well in Pennsylvania helped launch the modern American petroleum industry.

Oil could now be extracted from beneath the ground and refined into products for which there was a rapidly growing market.

And that market was hungry.

Kerosene lamps offered practical, relatively inexpensive lighting. As petroleum supplies expanded, kerosene increasingly displaced whale oil in lamps. Petroleum-derived lubricants also began competing with whale oils in various applications.

The whale was no longer the only answer to the question of how to keep the lights burning.

A new kind of liquid gold

As kerosene and petroleum products became more widely available, the demand for whale oil used in lighting declined. The economics of whaling changed, and the industry that had once been so profitable faced mounting competition.

But the story did not end overnight.

Whaling continued, and other whale products remained valuable. Baleen, for example, continued to be used in clothing and manufactured goods until new materials began to replace it. Some forms of commercial whaling persisted well into the 20th century.

And so the wheel turns

Whale oil had once been liquid gold.

But a new contender was rising from beneath the earth.

It could be pumped, refined and sold on an industrial scale. And unlike the whale, it didn't need to be hunted across half the world's oceans.

The new currency was oil.