OIL

OIL

Our complex industrial civilization is more dependent on oil than on any other product. Oil provides the gasoline that runs most of our motor cars, trucks, farm machinery. It provides the fuel oil that runs most of our warships, much of our industrial machinery, and many of the generators that produce electrical power. It provides most of the lubricants, without which no machinery can operate. It provides heat. It provides hundreds of medical and industrial by products, and synthetic products such as rubber and other plastics.

It is only within the last hundred years that man has found so many uses for oil. In the thousands of years that this great gift from nature has lain in the earth and upon its surface, man had used it only occasionally, in building ships, making lamps, and for a few other purposes.