Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 1.djvu/58

Rh hole to Titusville by one pump. He met with ridicule, but he insisted on trying it in the new line his company had acquired. The experiment was entirely successful. Improvements followed as rapidly as hands could carry out the suggestions of ingenuity and energy. One of the most important made the first year of the business was connecting wells by pipe directly with the tanks at the pumping stations, thus doing away with the expensive hauling in barrels to the "dump." A new device for accounting to the producer for his oil was made necessary by this change, and the practice of taking the gauge or measure of the oil in the producer's tank before and after the run and issuing duplicate "run tickets" was devised by Mr. Hatch. The producers, however, were not all "square"; it sometimes happened that they sold oil by a transfer order on the pipe-line, which they did not have in the line! To prevent these the Empire Transportation Company in 1868 began to issue certificates for credit balances of oil; these soon became the general mediums of trade in oil, and remain so to-day.

One of the cleverest of the pipe-line devices of the Empire Company was its assessment for waste and fire. In running oil through pipes there is more or less lost by leaking and evaporation. In September, 1868, Mr. Hatch announced that thereafter he would deduct two per cent. from oil runs for wastage. The assessment raised almost a riot in the region, meetings were held, the Empire Transportation Company was denounced as a highway robber, and threats of violence were made if the order was enforced. While this excitement was in progress there came a big fire on the line. Now the company's officials had been studying the question of fire insurance from the start. Fires in the Oil Regions were as regular a feature of the business as explosions used to be on the Mississippi steamboats, and no regular fire insurance company would take the risk. It had been decided that at the first fire there should be announced what was called a "general average assessment,"