CARBON—LITTLE 255 
rels in reserve. The price of its raw material is subject to such range 
and violence of fluctuation as would put most manufacturers out of 
business, but the tank wagon is always on the route. Behind it is 
the second largest American industry and an investment of more 
than $9,000,000,000. 
No mere figures can, however, convey an adequate impression of 
the vast extent and permeating ramifications of the petroleum in- 
dustry. One must picture, if he can, the wildcatter with the spirit 
and optimistic courage of the pioneer; the driller, doggedly per- 
sistent and with a presidential economy of speech; the wild excite- 
ment of a discovery gusher; vast storage basins, which may hold 
3,000,000 barrels in a single concrete reservoir; tank farms, like 
strangely ordered villages; pipe lines of a length far exceeding that 
of all the railways in any country in the world except our own; 
tankers on every sea; the endless procession of tank cars to and from 
more than 500 refineries, some of which are cities in themselves; 
thousands of cracking units and gasoline-recovery plants; the tank 
wagons on every road and innumerable filling stations. Yet the re- 
fineries often receive no more per pound for gasoline than one pays 
for cordwood in Boston and little more than Bostonians pay for 
anthracite. 
An ample oil supply assures such benefits to industry and is so 
vitally essential in time of war that a somewhat menacing economic 
nationalism is developing around petroleum. We can, therefore, 
continue only at our peril the uncoordinated wastefulness which has 
always characterized our own production. As many have pointed 
out, this is chiefly due to the defective legal structure under which 
all owners in a field are now forced by the first driller to raise their 
oil or lose it to him. The remedy may well be in a Federal law com- 
pelling the development of the field as a unit, as Henry L. Doherty 
has recently urged before the Federal Oil Conservation Board. 
There are still amazing opportunities for economies in oil refining, 
as by the general introduction of modern fractionating equipment 
and the improved processing of lubricating oils. Moreover a new 
phase, of great significance, now confronts the industry, for petro- 
leum is about to take its place as a raw material of the first impor- 
tance in the synthesis of organic chemical compounds. It is to-day 
the source of numerous alcohols and their derivatives and may soon 
provide the cheapest base for the synthesis of rubber. 
Research has nowhere been more prolific in results of benefit to 
industry and to mankind than when applied to the chemistry of the 
compounds of carbon, and much of this fundamental research has 
been conducted by American chemists. 
