Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/269

Rh great cost of barrels (and here we must note that the total absence of timber from all this region is a very serious item in working expenses, as all the wood required for the derricks and other erections must be imported from afar).

In order to dispense with barrels, the Nöbel brothers resolved to carry pipes from their refineries to the sea-coast, so as to pump the oil direct into great iron tanks on board the steamers, whence it might at the end of its voyage be pumped into tanks on the railway, and so carried to great reservoirs in all parts of Russia. As the railway and steamboat companies persisted in their refusal to co-operate, the Nöbels were compelled to take every department of their business entirely into their own hands. So they sent to Stockholm and to Russia to have steamers built specially for their own trade, fitted with great cisterns capable of containing seven hundred and fifty tons of oil, and constructed to burn only oil-fuel. They now own upward of a dozen large steamers on the Caspian, and thirty specially adapted for traffic on the Volga; and, besides these, they charter fully twoscore more steamers to carry their naphtha refuse to various ports for sale.

The petroleum shipped at Baku is carried direct to Tzaritzin on the Volga, whence it is dispatched by rail to every part of the empire in trains, each numbering twenty-five oil-cars. Thus it is conveyed even to the shores of the Baltic, whence it passes on to Sweden, to Germany, and wherever else it can effect an entrance, in determined rivalry to the petroleum of America, which it has already well-nigh expelled from the vast Russian market.

In every direction is the Caspian oil now spreading. In 1883 about a thousand tons were sent to England to try the British market. A somewhat larger quantity was sold in France, and extensive orders were taken for Austria. But it must have required the inventive genius of a Swede to think of sending coals to Newcastle, in the form of sending lubricating oil for machinery to America, and even this has been successfully done! And now that the railway has been completed from Baku to Tiflis, and to Poti and Batoum on the Black Sea, the market of the whole world is open to receive the inexhaustible supplies of the Caucasian oil-fields. Turkey, and all lands on the shores of the Mediterranean, with all that may be reached via the Suez Canal and Red Sea, Southern India, China, and Japan—all are open markets for whoever can supply the best oil at the cheapest rate. It is therefore evident that America has now a formidable rival in the field.

Of the relative merits of Pennsylvanian and Caspian oil, it may be said generally that the former yields on an average seventy per cent of kerosene, with a large residuum of lubricating oil. The latter yields only from twenty-five to thirty-five per cent of pure oil, and from twenty to thirty per cent is refuse, only fit for fuel. But here Nature seems to adapt her gifts to the need of the recipients, since