Big Business and Trusts: Creating New Forms of Corporate Organization

--Entrepreneurs in oil, salt, sugar, tobacco, and meatpacking industries rushed to copy Carnegie's method of lowering costs to drive rivals out of the market
--Edwin L. Drake drilled the first successful oil well in 1859
--Petroleum (crude oil) was refined into Kerosene and used in lamps, replacing animal fat
--John D. Rockefeller (from Cleveland) opened his first refinery in 1863, using Carnegie's cost-cutting techniques, realizing that small changes could save thousands of dollars. He worked toward vertical integration of his firm and forced out competitors. Bye 1879 he controlled 90% of the country's oil businesses.
--Strong as he was, Rockefeller about competition and set up the Standard Oil Trust, which created an umbrella corporation that ran all the oil companies and consolidated them, controlling them horizontally as well as vertically.
--Rockefeller’s trust was copied by many other industries, but legislatures decided they were corrupt, stamping out all competition and making monopolies. The government prosecuted 18 trusts and put those in charge in jail, but the Sherman Act of 1895 was sympathetic to big business and failed to stamp all of them out, so by 1900, these huge firms accounted for 2/5 of the nation’s manufacturing sector.

(my notes on oil and trusts- somewhat incomplete)