Given his trying childhood and early lifetime of near penury, neither Rockefeller’s severe personality or outsized ambition was surprising. Rockefeller moved to a Cleveland suburb at the age of 14. Reared in hardscrabble upstate New York, the young John D. (Much to his son’s chagrin, all would be exposed in 1908, two years after the old man breathed his last, in Joseph Pulitzer’s paper, the World, in a piece entitled “Secret Double Life of Rockefeller’s Father Revealed by the World.”) William Levingston - a sobriquet adopted, in part, to evade a statutory rape indictment dating from the 1840s – spent a fair bit of his seniority dodging reporters before finally passing away at the ripe age of 96. So improbable (and titillating) was the contrast with the son who became richest of all the world’s citizens that the man who would in latter life call himself Dr. In all these ways except the complicated part, the richest man in the world was most unlike his own father, a quack doctor and patent medicine salesman who maintained two wives and two households before abandoning his first family to live with a second under an assumed name. Many would recall his philanthropy, Baptist piety and fidelity to his wife. Or for the colorful roadmap of wildly unscrupulous corporate behavior which Standard Oil, his life’s work and the roaring engine of his great prosperity, devised. In this multi-part series ( here is the history of how the oil industry made its blueprint for pollution trashing Pennsylvania first ), award-winning journalist Jamie Kitman will lay out how American corporate and government entities have been cooperating on a vastly more costly, complex and deadly energy project for well over a century: gasoline.īorn July 8, 1839, John Davison Rockefeller, the son of William Avery Rockefeller and Elisa Davison, would be remembered at the time of his death nearly 100 years later not just for the sumptuous fortune he left behind as the world’s first billionaire. One of the primary arguments levied against electric cars and electric charging infrastructure has been that bringing both into the mainstream would take significant investment from private and public actors, and that this has not generally been politically palatable in the United States. So far, Jalopnik’s tech coverage has been focused primarily on the emergence, or reemergence of the electric vehicle. This is the fourth story in a series of stories on the history of gasoline. It’s a long story, but it began a long time ago and it ain’t over yet, so it bears telling. DuPont and its longtime corporate ward, General Motors, who invented leaded gasoline, will be considered in the weeks ahead, but here, Standard Oil of New Jersey, the company affectionately known today as ExxonMobil, is in the spotlight. Over the course of its next four installments, Jamie Kitman’s Brief History of Gasoline will examine three of the main actors in the saga that brought us tetra-ethyl lead and a host of other unsavory gasoline additives. Before you can begin selling one of the deadliest products man has ever made – leaded gasoline – it helps that the corporate persons have reckless and ruthless pasts.
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