> As I mentioned earlier, right from the start whale oil had other uses, beyond lighting. It was used to grease naval clocks, as well as being deployed in pharmaceuticals, paints and explosives.
Kerosene replaced the widespread, low margin, highly price sensitive use of spermaceti oil.
If the common person is using spermaceti oil for light every single day, there is no politically tenable way you can restrict the supply.
Kerosene replaces that, and now the common person doesn't really know or care about spermaceti oil.
Notice also the other use cases are generally higher up in the value chain than just burning it for light. Naval clocks, pharmaceuticals, paints, explosives. In addition, the users are more concentrated. Everybody burned spermaceti oil for lamps. There are only a few places that make naval clocks, pharmaceuticals, paints, and explosives. And they have the ability to absorb R&D costs for different lubricants because that is a high value use case.
A similar example of this is CFCs being banned. They were used in high value use cases with a limited amount of users. And even there, there was pushback with regard to home AC units - things that affected the common people.
The lesson we should take from this is that we need technology to provide us with alternatives for the common, price sensitive, widespread uses of something, before it becomes tenable to enact any type of supply restriction on it.
And then we can rely on the high value use cases finding alternatives.
The article goes on to make the same error again though.
If the common person's automatic transmission needs whale oil you can't ban it.
The kind of oil that can be produced in the conditions of a mammal's body tends to not hold up to well in a 300deg automatic transmission. Synthetic oil was developed because using a factory to do "this can't happen in a body" things to tree oil results in a superior performing product. These products were adopted because they're better. And then there was little need to use whale oil, so it got banned at which point the synthetic new hotness got back ported into the older specifications of oil.
News from the time [0], certainly suggests that regulation was the cause, rather than synthetics being "better".
> The trouble involved the cooling unit for the automatic transmission oil, which is placed in the car's radiator. The fittings between the cooling unit and the radiator gave no trouble when whale oil was the fluid, but the substitute allowed the fittings to corrode. That permitted the oil to get into the radiator's cooling system and the radiator's antifreeze to get into the transmission.
You seem to have a strong claim you'd like to make on this point. It might be true, but it's a claim offered without much evidence.
I guess one thing I'd be curious about is: were non-synthetic non-animal alternatives substituted for whale oil in large quantities before synthetics took over? If so, that would be one data point in favor of the idea that regulation (and possibly the decline of the species) was the driving factor, rather than the superiority of synthetics.
And the author missed the reason:
> As I mentioned earlier, right from the start whale oil had other uses, beyond lighting. It was used to grease naval clocks, as well as being deployed in pharmaceuticals, paints and explosives.
Kerosene replaced the widespread, low margin, highly price sensitive use of spermaceti oil.
If the common person is using spermaceti oil for light every single day, there is no politically tenable way you can restrict the supply.
Kerosene replaces that, and now the common person doesn't really know or care about spermaceti oil.
Notice also the other use cases are generally higher up in the value chain than just burning it for light. Naval clocks, pharmaceuticals, paints, explosives. In addition, the users are more concentrated. Everybody burned spermaceti oil for lamps. There are only a few places that make naval clocks, pharmaceuticals, paints, and explosives. And they have the ability to absorb R&D costs for different lubricants because that is a high value use case.
A similar example of this is CFCs being banned. They were used in high value use cases with a limited amount of users. And even there, there was pushback with regard to home AC units - things that affected the common people.
The lesson we should take from this is that we need technology to provide us with alternatives for the common, price sensitive, widespread uses of something, before it becomes tenable to enact any type of supply restriction on it.
And then we can rely on the high value use cases finding alternatives.