Well, Morgan had noticed that the price of recovering the oil was increasing every year, and foresaw even further rises in the cost of his operations.


The world knew that oil wouldn't last forever, and people like Morgan thought that at the current rate of production the source would soon run dry. Fortunately for him, he recognized this trend and was able to get out of the industry at peak prices, generating a healthy profit for himself.

This may sound like a headline from the future when the earth's oil reserves will have reached dangerously low levels, but it actually happened over one hundred years ago, in 1847. The source of oil back then, however, was whales.