Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…This is all going on. It's not that far away from Cleveland. For the first couple years of this going on up until the Civil War, the whole industry is just based there in Titusville. They drill for the oil, the oil comes out of the ground, they refine the oil, and they make kerosene. When we say they were refining, it was a pretty rough process. I think pretty early, they figured out you could use sulfuric acid to refine and separate the kerosene out, but a crap ton of sulfuric acid and doing this in large wooden boxes with cracks in it everywhere. It's just sloshing around and spilling all over the ground. It is a gnarly process of "refining." Super gnarly. Right as Rockefeller and Clark have all this money that they need to have something to do with, people come up with the idea. With the oil they were refining into kerosene, the main use was to burn in lamps. Where do you need lamps and artificial light more than anywhere else? You need it in cities. People realized you don't actually have to refine the oil in the same place that you drill for the oil. All of a sudden now, people are like, wait, we can buy the crude oil that comes out of the ground from Titusville, bring it into our cities, refine it in the cities, and then sell the kerosene in the city. That's a really good business. That's a good place to park some capital.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.