January 7, 2025

This Halas & Batchelor animation gets off to quite a jaunty, sea shanty, type of start as a burgeoning oil sprite kicks us off in Pennsylvania in 1861 where the derricks are already pounding the ground looking for him! Next thing, the place is littered with these steel towers and the days of the horse and carriage are numbered! How to get this stuff to where it's needed, though? There are barrels and barrels of this stuff. Can the whaling ships h… read the rest.

This Halas & Batchelor animation gets off to quite a jaunty, sea shanty, type of start as a burgeoning oil sprite kicks us off in Pennsylvania in 1861 where the derricks are already pounding the ground looking for him! Next thing, the place is littered with these steel towers and the days of the horse and carriage are numbered! How to get this stuff to where it's needed, though? There are barrels and barrels of this stuff. Can the whaling ships help? Well let's see but beware these barrels are full of devilish content apt to escape - with a bang, if you're not careful! It's not the oil leaking they fear, it's the gas that could send them all to the bottom! Soon, though, the oil business is thriving and the ships are now being fitted with iron hulls, steam engines and - yep, the first tankers are born. It's here the animation comes alive a bit as the narration takes us through some of the design aspects that moved the engines, allowed for ventilation, and we end up with the "S.S. Gluckhauf" - the world's first specifically designed tanker. Of course, the more the demand the bigger the ships need to get and the more ingenious the solutions need to get to keep the boats afloat - just look at the S.S. "Narraganett" (1903), nope skip 20 years to the much more solid and capable "British Inventor" (1925) or the "British Energy" (1931) or the "British Endurance" (1936) and just in time for the second world war, we've the "British Tradition" (1941). After the war, the "British Chivalry" (1949) before the "British Adventure" (1951) can carry over 28,000! It's got it's tongue in it's cheek this - and it's paid for by BP so there's bound to be just a little extra Britishness herein, but it's still quite an entertaining look at just how this most valuable and difficult to ship of commercially valuable freight became readily accessible the world-over thanks to some ingenious engineering and lots of red lead paint.

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