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A bottle of whale oil. Whale oil is oil obtained from the blubber of whales. [1] Oil from the bowhead whale was sometimes known as train-oil, which comes from the Dutch word traan ("tear drop"). Sperm oil, a special kind of oil obtained from the head cavities of sperm whales, differs chemically from ordinary whale oil: it is composed mostly of ...
The first such whale hunting ship was the steamer Mabel Bird, which towed whale carcasses to an oil processing plant in Boothbay Harbor. At its height in 1885 four or five steamers were engaged in whale fishery at Boothbay Harbour, dwindling to one by the end of the decade.
The invention of oil refining led to the availability of kerosene as lamp oil, which has a smokeless combustion in contrast with the until then highly used whale oil. The lamp oil became known as Pennsylvania Kerosine. Due to overfishing, whale oil became rare and expensive. By this time, petroleum oil had already begun to supplant fish, whale ...
Whale oil was the result of "trying-out" whale blubber by heating in water. It was a primary lubricant for machinery, whose expansion through the Industrial Revolution depended upon before the development of petroleum-based lubricants in the second half of the 19th century. Once the prized blubber and spermaceti had been extracted from the ...
New Bedford was once the city that lit the world, exporting vast quantities of whale oil for lamps in the early 1800s. Nearly two centuries later New Bedford aspires to light the world again, in a ...
The hardened whale oil was also used to make soap, with Lever Brothers the major user of whale oil in Britain. [73] A major event in the post-war years was the purchase of the Southern Whaling Company by Lever Brothers for £360,000 in September 1919. [74]
Norwegian companies caught large numbers of blue whales and profited from a wartime increase in the price of whale oil from 1915 to 1918. However, the boom ended in 1919 with a sharp decline in oil prices and a shrinking market in the U.S. resulting in bankruptcy. [22]
Whale oil and baleen (whalebone) taken by bay whalers, and sperm whale oil taken by pelagic whalers, were among Australia's earliest exports. [41] Sealing and whaling contributed more to the colonial economy than land produce until the 1830s when the fisheries were overtaken by wool production. [42] The Hobart whaling ship Pacific, by William ...