Shane Parrish
speaker
20,679 appearances
49 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 15 Sep
Shane Parrish’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.
Appearances
That was Rockefeller at 40.
At Standard Oil, by the mid-1870s, the fight had moved out of the refineries into the oil fields again.
A new threat had emerged.
It was a pipe.
The industry had evolved.
Crude oil no longer traveled from a well to a railroad in barrels on a teenster's wagon as it had 20 years before.
Barrels were now barely even used.
Crude oil now traveled through short pipelines to trains where it was loaded onto tanker cars.
Standard oil had bought and built its way into control of nearly all of these short pipelines.
When a driller stuck oil, a standard oil crew would swoop in to connect the new well to their system immediately.
Almost all Pennsylvania crude now began its journey above ground in Rockefeller pipe and finished it on a railroad whose rates Rockefeller had carefully arranged.
In late 1877, the desperate remaining independent refiners crowded into Titusville, Pennsylvania for what they called a petroleum parliament.
They were all hunting for a way out from under the standard oil machine.
The idea they landed on sounded close to impossible, a massive pipeline designed to move crude oil long distances over 100 miles.
At the time, the longest pipeline ran just 30 miles, and nobody knew whether crude oil could be pumped over such a distance at all.
The independent refiners proposed to find out.
They called it the Tidewater Pipeline.
The plan was audacious.
It would be a six-inch pipe running from the Pennsylvania oil fields up and over the Allegheny Mountains to a railhead owned by Philadelphia's Reading Railroad.
It was one of the few railroads not yet under Standard Oil's thumb.
Showing 1721–1740 of 20,679 · page 87 of 1034
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