1892 - Energy

Energy

An improved carburetor invented by Gottlieb Daimler mixes vaporized fuel with air to create a combustible or explosive gas (see 1890; Lenoir, 1860; Maybach, 1893).

Shell Oil has its beginnings as English entrepreneur Marcus Samuel, 39, sends his first tanker through the Suez Canal with oil for Singapore, Bangkok, and other destinations to break the Standard Oil monopoly in the Far East (see Royal Dutch, 1890). Samuel and his brother control the trading company M. Samuel & Company, begun in 1830 by their late father, Marcus's namesake, as a Houndsditch, London, shop dealing in seashells. The younger Marcus Samuel first became interested in petroleum on a visit to Japan, he ships Russian oil to the Orient, and he will establish such a reputation for probity that the Japanese government will entrust him with the issue of its first gold bonds in the amount of £4.5 million (see Royal Dutch-Shell, 1907).

Wisconsin-born entrepreneur Edward L. (Lawrence) Doheny, 37, finds oil at Los Angeles in the spring (see Union Oil, 1889). Unemployed and unable to pay his hotel bill, he has been living with his wife and young daughter in a downtown boarding house, seen a wagon hauling chunks of a dark, greasy substance, and asked the driver what it was; told that it was brea (Spanish for pitch), he inquired about its source, took a streetcar out to Westlake Park, and saw the tarry substance oozing out of a large hole. An ice factory has been using the stuff for fuel, and Doheny persuades his friend Charles Canfield to lease a three-lot parcel of land for $400, but although they make some progress digging a well through the oil-soaked soil with picks and shovels they are stopped by gas fumes (see 1893)

The Ohio Supreme Court outlaws John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Trust under the 1890 Sherman Act, but Rockefeller retains control of the trust properties through Standard Oil of New Jersey, a new company incorporated under a recent New Jersey holding-company law that permits companies chartered at Trenton to hold stock in other corporations (see 1884; Lake Superior Consolidated Iron Mines, 1893; Supreme Court decision, 1911).

The diesel engine invented by Paris-born German engineer Rudolf Diesel, 33, operates on a fuel that is less highly refined than gasoline and less costly; instead of using an air-fuel mixture as in internal combustion engines, it employs a piston to compress air to a very high pressure, making it so hot that when fuel is injected it ignites without an electrical ignition system. Its higher compression rates give it higher theoretical cycle efficiencies, and because it is simpler than a gasoline engine it is more trouble-free, but it is also noisier and emits more pollutants. Diesel files for a German patent February 28 (see 1893).

N.V. Philips Gloeilampenfabrieken has its beginnings at Eindhoven, the Netherlands, where mechanical engineer Gerard (Leonard Frederik) Philips, 33, begins production of incandescent electric lamps. Gerard's youngest brother Anton Frederik, now 18, will join the firm in 1895 and obtain a contract to supply the Russian court with 50,000 lightbulbs per year; by the turn of the century Philips will be Europe's third-largest lamp producer.

General Electric Company is created through a merger engineered by New York financier J. P. Morgan, who combines Henry Villard's Edison General Electric with Charles A. Coffin's Thomson-Houston (see 1883), eliminating the Edison name because it has lost prestige since the electric chair fiasco 2 years ago and because Thomas Edison still favors direct current, not AC (see Langmuir, 1912). Edison General Electric absorbed engineer Frank J. Sprague's Electric Railway & Motor Company in 1890, and Sprague now goes into competition with Otis Elevator Company; his Sprague Electric Elevator Company will produce about 600 elevators before selling out to Otis (see transportation, 1897).

Commonwealth Edison Company is founded at Chicago by Samuel Insull, who quits his $36,000-per-year vice presidency at Edison General Electric to head Chicago Edison Company at $12,000 per year. Now 32, the London-born Insull has become convinced that electricity's real future is not in manufacturing equipment but rather in developing central generating stations, recognizing that utilities have a "natural monopoly." He promptly borrows $250,000 from retail merchant Marshall Field and uses that and his own savings to buy stock in the small utility, which has less than $1 million in assets but will have 50 times that much by 1907 as it takes over all of Chicago's electric-power production, generating more than the utilities of New York, Brooklyn, and Boston combined, with annual revenues of $8 million (see Middle West Utilities, 1912).

The law of hysteresis discovered by German-born U.S. engineer Charles Proteus Steinmetz, 27, will improve the efficiency of electric motors, generators, and transformers. Steinmetz fled Berlin 4 years ago to escape prosecution in connection with a socialist newspaper he was editing and came to the United States a year later. A hunchbacked wizard, he changed his name from Karl August Rudolf to Charles Proteus, using the nickname Proteus given him as a student at the University of Breslau. The Steinmetz discovery permits engineers to forecast accurately how much electric power will be lost as a result of residual magnetism in electromagnets and will result in generators and motors designed to minimize such loss (see 1893).