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Updated: May 4, 2025
To operate pipe-lines required franchises from the states in which they were located and consequently corporations in those states just as railroads running through different states are forced to operate under separate state charters. To perfect the pipe-line system of transportation required many millions of capital. The entire oil business is dependent upon the pipe-line.
When pipe-lines had been built to oil fields where the wells had ceased to yield, as often happened, they were about the most useless property imaginable. An interesting feature developed through the relations which grew up between the railroads and the pipe-lines.
"All yielding tribute to me, even as the mines and mills and factories I cannot see yield tribute! Even as the oil-wells, the pipe-lines, the railroads and the subways yield even as the whole world yields it. All this labor, all this busy strife, I have a hand in. The millions eat and drink and buy and sell; and I take toll of it yet it is not enough.
Many of the pipe-lines were constructed during a period when costs were about 50 per cent. of what they are now. Great fields of oil lands were purchased as virgin soil, which later yielded an immense output.
A majority of the great oil wells are about ten miles from Baku, and a dozen pipe-lines convey the petroleum from them to Black Town, a suburb of Baku, where it is stored and refined. From one well alone the escaping oil would have brought more than five million dollars had it been saved.
Pipe-lines could easily be extended, from it, to cover practically a quarter to a third of the United States. Eventually we'll put in another plant in Chicago, one in Denver and one on the Pacific Coast. Then, in time, there must be distributing centers in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. But for the present, we'll begin with the Niagara plant.
In 1906 came the Hepburn Act under Roosevelt, giving general power to the commission to fix rates upon complaint, to make joint rates, extending the statute to the oil pipe-lines, express companies, and sleeping-car companies, and going to the verge of the Constitution in an effort to provide that rates fixed by the commission should take immediate effect.
It has not hesitated to invest millions of dollars in methods for cheapening the gathering and distribution of oils by pipe-lines, special cars, tank-steamers, and tank-wagons. It has erected tank-stations at railroad centres in every part of the country to cheapen the storage and delivery of oil.
"But how?" asked Denis, trying not to show how deeply he had been insulted by that final "well." "By cultivating your Inspiration, by getting into touch with your Subconscious. Have you ever read my little book, 'Pipe-Lines to the Infinite'?" Denis had to confess that that was, precisely, one of the few, perhaps the only one, of Mr. Barbecue-Smith's works he had not read.
Wait till they get it under full swing wait till their pipe-lines and tanks and instruments and all their vast, infernal apparatus of exploitation and enslavement are in operation! Even in a week from now, or less, by the time you issue the call, Gabriel, you may see wretches gasping in vain for breath, in some dark alley of Niagara where the air is being drained!"
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