Petroleum did not save the whales; whaling actually peaked in the 1960s
A popular story says kerosene rescued whales by making their oil obsolete. In fact, commercial whaling hit its peak in the 1960s, long after petroleum arrived. Whale oil had lit London's streets and oiled the Industrial Revolution, and sperm whale oil even lubricated parts of Apollo lunar modules before a moratorium in 1986 largely ended the trade.
The oil came from blubber. Whalers stripped it from the carcass, a job called flensing, then boiled it down in a process known as trying out, either on shore or, on long voyages, in shipboard furnaces called tryworks. Slow, docile bowhead and right whales, which float when killed and yield abundant oil and baleen, were the favourite targets and were hunted almost to extinction. Bowhead oil was called train-oil, from a Dutch word for teardrop. Sperm whales supplied a distinct, pricier product from their head cavities, mostly liquid wax.
Chemically, ordinary whale oil is made of triglycerides, while oil from toothed whales contains wax esters. It is clear, thinner than olive oil and ranges from honey yellow to dark brown, with a powerful fishy smell. Its big advantage was burning brighter and with less smoke than cheaper rivals. London had some five thousand whale oil street lamps in the 1740s, and Vauxhall Gardens needed so much that staff pilfered it.
American whaling grew from the late eighteenth century and peaked around the 1860s, when piped coal gas, mineral oil and later kerosene took over lighting. United States output fell from 320,000 barrels in 1854 to 1,800 in 1905. But the global industry found new markets. After hydrogenation was invented early in the twentieth century, whale oil went into margarine, and it also appeared in industrial soaps, cosmetics and clothing.
Sperm oil stayed prized as a lubricant for fine machinery, missiles and car transmissions; when supplies dried up, General Motors reported corrosion in thousands of transmissions in 1975. Ultimately scarcity and substitutes eroded whaling's profits, and the International Whaling Commission's 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling all but ended whale oil's use.
Source: Whale oil
