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The Prize : The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (Paperback)
by Daniel Yergin
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History of the Cold War |
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Daniel Yergin has the entire detailed history of the Oil Industry from the first discovery in Titusville, PA to the invasion of Iraq with easy and flowing storyteller style. |
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Author: Daniel Yergin
Publisher: Free Press
Pub. in: January, 1993
ISBN: 0671799320
Pages: 928
Measurements: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00831
Other information: Reissue edition
ISBN-13: 978-0671799328
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- Awards & Credential -
A winner of the Pulitzer Prize. |
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- MSL Picks -
The Prize is considered to be the "black bible" of the oil industry. Yergin has written an outstanding book, so well researched that just the notes and bibliography together are almost 100 pages!! This book is highly deserving of the Pulitzer price.
The author starts back in the 19th century. The big day, 27 August 1859, the day "The Colonel" Edwin L. Drake found oil in Titusville, Texas - till just after the Golf War in 1991. Many pages are dedicated to men that made a huge impact, and was an important part of this history - Nobel, Teagle, Rockefeller, "The Colonel" (Drake), Gulbenkian, and Churchill just to mention a few. Further, the author gives us an insight to the politics in the oil industry, governmental interference and how the politics in the industry works. In lay man terms Yergin explains why and how vulnerable the industry is, about the more resent but also the past oil-crisis, how little it takes for the oil-price to spin out of control, and how the economies around the world more and more depend on the black gold.
- From quoting Hilde
Target readers:
People who are interested in the oil industry
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Daniel Yergin is an authority on world affairs and the oil business. He is President of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a leading international energy consulting firm. He was previously a lecturer at the Harvard Business School and the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard. He coauthored the bestseller Energy Future, and his prize-winning book Shattered Peace has become a classic history on the origins of the Cold War. The Prize also won the 1992 Eccles Prize.
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From the publisher
The Prize recounts the panoramic history of oil - and the struggle for wealth power that has always surrounded oil. This struggle has shaken the world economy, dictated the outcome of wars, and transformed the destiny of men and nations. The Prize is as much a history of the twentieth century as of the oil industry itself. The canvas of this history is enormous - from the drilling of the first well in Pennsylvania through two great world wars to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Operation Desert Storm.
The cast extends from wildcatters and rogues to oil tycoons, and from Winston Churchill and Ibn Saud to George Bush and Saddam Hussein. The definitive work on the subject of oil and a major contribution to understanding our century, The Prize is a book of extraordinary breadth, riveting excitement - and great importance.
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CHAPTER 1
Oil on the Brain: The Beginning
There was the matter of the missing $526.08.
A professor's salary in the 1850s was hardly generous, and in the quest for extra income, Benjamin Silliman, Jr., the son of a great American chemist and himself a distinguished professor of chemistry at Yale University, had taken on an outside research project for a fee totaling $526.08. He had been retained in 1854 by a group of promoters and businessmen, but, though he had completed the project, the promised fee was not forthcoming. Silliman, his ire rising, wanted to know where the money was. His anger was aimed at the leaders of the investor group, in particular, at George Bissell, a New York lawyer, and James Townsend, president of a bank in New Haven. Townsend, for his part, had sought to keep a low profile, as he feared it would look most inappropriate to his depositors if they learned he was involved in so speculative a venture.
For what Bissell, Townsend, and the other members of the group had in mind was nothing less than hubris, a grandiose vision for the future of a substance that was known as "rock oil" - so called to distinguish it from vegetable oils and animal fats. Rock oil, they knew, bubbled up in springs or seeped into salt wells in the area around Oil Creek, in the isolated wooded hills of northwestern Pennsylvania. There, in the back of beyond, a few barrels of this dark, smelly substance were gathered by primitive means - either by skimming it off the surface of springs and creeks or by wringing out rags or blankets that had been soaked in the oily waters. The bulk of this tiny supply was used to make medicine.
The group thought that the rock oil could be exploited in far larger quantities and processed into a fluid that could be burned as an illuminant in lamps. This new illuminant, they were sure, would be highly competitive with the "coal-oils" that were winning markets in the 1850S. In short, they believed that, if they could obtain it in sufficient quantities, they could bring to market the inexpensive, high-quality illuminant that mid-nineteenth-century man so desperately needed. They were convinced that they could light up the towns and farms of Noah America and Europe. Almost as important, they could use rock oil to lubricate the moving parts of the dawning mechanical age. And, like all entrepreneurs who became persuaded by their own dreams, they were further convinced that by doing all of this they would grow very rich indeed. Many scoffed at them. Yet, persevering, they would succeed in laying the basis for an entirely new era in the history of mankind - the age of oil.
To "Assuage Our Woes"
The venture had its origins in a series of accidental glimpses - and in the determination of one man, George Bissell, who, more than anybody else, was responsible for the creation of the oil industry. With his long, towering face and broad forehead, Bissell conveyed an impression of intellectual force. But he was also shrewd and open to business opportunity, as experience had forced him to be. Self-supporting from the age of twelve, Bissell had worked his way through Dartmouth College by teaching and writing articles. For a time after graduation, he was a professor of Latin and Greek, then went to Washington, D.C., to work as a journalist. He finally ended up in New Orleans, where he became principal of a high school and then superintendent of public schools. In his spare time, he studied to become a lawyer and taught himself several more languages. Altogether, he became fluent in French, Spanish, and Portuguese and could read and write Hebrew, Sanskrit, ancient and modern Greek, Latin and German. Ill health forced him to head back north in 1853, and passing through western Pennsylvania on his way home, he saw something of the primitive oil-gathering industry with its skimmings and oil-soaked rags. Soon after, while visiting his mother in Hanover, New Hampshire, he dropped in on his alma mater, Dartmouth College, where in a professor's office he spied a bottle containing a sample of this same Pennsylvania rock oil. It had been brought there a few weeks earlier by another Dartmouth graduate, a physician practicing as a country doctor in western Pennsylvania.
Bissell knew that amounts of rock oil were being used as patent and folk medicines to relieve everything from headaches, toothaches, and deafness to stomach upsets, worms, rheumatism, and dropsy - and to heal wounds on the backs of horses and mules. It was called "Seneca Oil" after the local Indians and in honor of their chief, Red Jacket, who had supposedly imparted its healing secrets to the white man. One purveyor of Seneca Oil advertised its "wonderful curative powers" in a poem:
The Healthful balm, from Nature's secret spring,
The bloom of health, and life, to man will bring;
As from her depths the magic liquid flows,
To calm our sufferings, and assuage our woes.
Bissell knew that the viscous black liquid was flammable. Seeing the rock oil sample at Dartmouth, he conceived, in a flash, that it could be used not as a medicine but as an illuminant - and that it might well assuage the woes of his pocketbook. He could put the specter of poverty behind him and become rich from promoting it. That intuition would become his guiding principle and his faith, both of which would be sorely tested during the next six years, as disappointment consistently overwhelmed hope.
The Disappearing Professor
But could the rock oil really be used as an illuminant? Bissell aroused the interest of other investors, and in late 1854 the group engaged Yale's Professor Silliman to analyze the properties of the oil both as an illuminant and lubricant. Perhaps even more important, they wanted Silliman to put his distinguished imprimatur on the project so they could sell stock and raise the capital to carry on. They could not have chosen a better man for their purposes. Heavyset and vigorous, with a "good, jolly face," Silliman carried one of the greatest and most respected names in nineteenth-century science. The son of the founder of American chemistry, he himself was one of the most distinguished scientists of his time, as well as the author of the leading textbooks in physics and chemistry. Yale was the scientific capital of mid-nineteenth-century America, and the Sillimans, father and son, were at the center of it.
But Silliman was less interested in the abstract than in the decidedly practical, which drew him to the world of business. Moreover, while reputation and pure science were grand, Silliman was perennially in need of supplementary income. Academic salaries were low and he had a growing family; so he habitually took on outside consulting jobs, making geological and chemical evaluations for a variety of clients. His taste for the practical would also carry him into direct participation in speculative business ventures, the success of which, he explained, would give him "plenty of sea room... for science." A brother-in-law was more skeptical. Benjamin Silliman, Jr., he said, "is on the constant go in behalf of one thing or another, and alas for Science."
When Silliman undertook his analysis of rock oil, he gave his new clients good reason to think they would get the report they wanted. "I can promise you," he declared early in his research, "that the result will meet your expectations of the value of this material." Three months later, nearing the end of his research, he was even more enthusiastic, reporting "unexpected success in the use of the distillate product of Rock Oil as an illuminator." The investors waited eagerly for the final report. But then came the big hitch. They owed Silliman the $526.08 (the equivalent of about $5,000 today), and he had insisted that they deposit $100 as a down payment into his account in New York City. Silliman's bill was much higher than they had expected. They had not made the deposit, and the professor was upset and angry. After all, he had not taken on the project merely out of intellectual curiosity. He needed the money, badly, and he wanted it soon. He made it very clear that he would withhold the study until he was paid. Indeed, to drive home his complaint, he secretly handed over the report to a friend for safe-keeping until satisfactory arrangements were made, and took himself off on a tour of the South, where he could not easily be reached.
The investors grew desperate. The final report was absolutely essential if they were to attract additional capital. They scrounged around, trying to find the money, but with no success. Finally, one of Bissell's partners, though complaining that "these are the hardest times I ever heard of," put up the money on his own security. The report, dated April 16 1855, was released to the investors and hurried to the printers. Though still appalled by Silliman's fee, the investors, in fact, got more than their money's worth. Silliman's study, as one historian put it, was nothing less than "a turning point in the establishment of the petroleum business." Silliman banished any doubts about the potential new uses for rock oil. He reported to his clients that it could be brought to various levels of boiling and thus distilled into several fractions, all composed of carbon and hydrogen. One of these fractions was a very high-quality illuminating oil. "Gentlemen," Silliman wrote to his clients, "it appears to me that there is much ground for encouragement in the belief that your Company have in their possession a raw material from which, by simple and not expensive processes, they may manufacture very valuable products." And, satisfied with the business relationship as it had finally been resolved, he held himself fully available to take on further projects. |
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| View all 10 comments |
A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-08 00:00>
As an engineer who has worked in both exploration and refining, I would have to recommend this as required reading for anyone who works in the oil and gas industry. Several years of working in the industry have given me a knowledge base, but nothing like the education Yergin gave me in The Prize. This book looks at the history of oil from its beginnings in Pennsylvania, the Standard Oil Trust, the middle east and all the other major discoveries that laid the foundation for the world's largest industry. The most interesting part of the book I found to be the major part oil and its supply played in both world wars. I had no idea what a crucial factor it was in instigating and ending the wars. What an amazing book!! It may be a bit long for those who are not familiar with the industry. But even so, for anyone with a thirst for knowledge about the world we live in, it will be extremely entertaining. Well deserving of a Pullitzer Prize when it was written. |
Craig (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-08 00:00>
Simply, this is a book one simply must read in order to get up to speed on the history of oil in world history. It affects the way we live, our prosperity, our technology, what we wear, what we eat, how we build our homes and work spaces, and even how and why we wage war. The book covers the history from the time that oil was sopped up from surface pits, to the discovery of "rock oil" and its uses to make kerosene and cheaper lighting through the 1991 first Gulf War.
It has always been a wild industry with big winners and big losers. Huge risks have paid big off handsomely and even more often have handed out ruin. Those building and running the industry have gone to the ends of the earth and down to its depths to acquire the crude that is made into so much of who we are today.
Yergin handles this big canvas well. He writes even handedly about the development of the industry and its geo-political implications. For example, the decision to move ships from coal to oil in World War I had huge implications and added much to British Naval Power. We all know how the issues of oil and the Middle-East and Israel are all mixed together in a dangerous balancing act that has been used by a few for their own ends rather than trying to find a path to peace.
This is an excellent book and one that I think essential to one's understanding of the world we inhabit. Please get a copy and enjoy all it has to offer. The book is about 775 pages with another couple of hundred pages of notes, index, and a three page chronology of major events in the history of oil from 1853 to 1991. |
Miller (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-08 00:00>
The Prize follows the major developments in the oil industry, from its inception with the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company through the Gulf War. The Prize well deserves the praise it has received. Yergin's research and knowledge of the history of the oil industry are obvious and make this a great historical work, yet the length and the abundance of detail do not impinge on the readability of the book.
Among many insightful sections of this book, I found the chapters on the role of oil in the Second World War to be particularly interesting. After reading other books about the battles of that war, it was useful to learn something about the logistics behind those battles.
It is unfortunate that this book is already a decade old. In his epilogue, Yergin touches on the Gulf War and the effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world's largest oil producer in the late 1980's, but this was not quite history yet when he was writing The Prize. |
Joe (MSL quote), USA
<2007-06-08 00:00>
I was amazed by this book. On almost every page, I found myself gasping, and wanting to share the latest development or information with whoever happened to be in the room at the time. If I was on my own, I often still said 'wow' out loud.
It's not just the information that is in this book, but the masterful way in which it is written. It is as gripping as any thriller. Ostensibly, it is the history of the oil industry, but this becomes so much more than a book about business. It's an excellent version of the history of the twentieth century, with all it's tribulations and compelling twists. I think this would probably be my desert island book. I plan to read it many, many times. |
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