When I mention that my family used kerosene lamps when I was a small child in the South during the 1930s, that is usually taken as a sign of our poverty, though I never thought of us as poor at the time.
What is ironic is that kerosene lamps were a luxury of the rich in the 19th century, before John D. Rockefeller came along. At the then-high price of kerosene, an ordinary working man couldn’t afford to stay up at night, burning expensive fuel for hours.
If there were a better way to extract, process and ship petroleum products — or more products that could be made from petroleum — Rockefeller was on top of it.
Before he came along, gasoline was considered a useless byproduct that petroleum refineries often simply dumped into the nearest river. But Rockefeller decided to use it as a fuel in the refining process, which made it valuable, even before automobiles came along.
Before Rockefeller’s innovations reduced the price of kerosene to a fraction of what it had once been, there wasn’t a lot for poor people to do when nightfall came, other than go to bed. But cheap kerosene added hours of light and activity to each day for people with low or moderate incomes.
At one time, people like Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and the Wright brothers were regarded as heroes for having opened vast new possibilities for other human beings. The fact that they got rich doing it was an incidental part of the story.
We still have people revolutionizing our lives. Just think of the computer and of the pharmaceuticals that have not only lengthened our lives but made them more healthful, so that being 80 today is like being 60 in times past.
But today we seldom even know the names of those who have made these monumental contributions to human well-being. All we know is that some people have gotten “rich” and that this is to be regarded as some sort of grievance.