One of the characters from Victorian Manchester whose life I researched was an oil & cotton merchant
Oil Merchant was a recognised category in the Manchester Directories of the time, though only a few names were ever listed
It was not until a late stage in my research that I thought: Hold on - what kind of oil?
Although there is a vast literature on the oil industry virtually all of it concentrates on petroleum. I established that my man was unlikely to be an oilman in that sense - I found the (to me) startling information that James Young, a Scottish engineer who worked for Tennants Brewery in Manchester had discovered a petroleum spring in a coal mine in Alfreton, Derbyshire which went into production in 1848. Unfortunately the spring soon ran dry, or I might be writing this from the equivalent of Derbyshire’s very own Dallas
With petroleum hardly out of its pram even half way through the 19th century, what kind of oil had been used to lubricate the Industrial Revolution, & from where did my merchant get his supplies?
That led me to another delightful discovery – the word tribology.
There is a standard work of history History of Tribology, 2nd Edition
by Duncan Dowson which I have not been able to read
and I could not find any other authoritative source
The main vegetable oils being traded at that time were linseed & olive, so it is possible they were used as machine oils for steam trains & cotton mills
But I think the most likely candidate is in fact whale oil
In todays climate it is easy to think of whaling as just a regrettable example of uncivilised barbarity, & to forget what an important role whaling played in our economic development
It wasn’t just whale meat & corsets
