John d rockefeller why was he important

In these first years of large-scale philanthropy, Rockefeller favored a few causes close to his heart. He was the single-most generous donor to the northern Baptist conventions, and he underwrote the work of missionaries and relief workers at home and abroad. He also took a deep interest in higher education for African Americans. In , he began a series of gifts to the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, a struggling school for African-American women.

Similar gifts were soon directed to two other black colleges—the Tuskegee Institute and Morehouse College. Rockefeller made his fortune through canny consolidation, careful cost management, and economies of scale.

Those instincts were reflected time and again in his charitable giving. Rather than make thousands of small, scattershot contributions, he preferred to make large donations to institutions that he believed had great promise.

A project of lifelong interest to him was the creation of a distinguished Baptist university. Rockefeller considered several options before pairing with William Rainey Harper to establish the University of Chicago. Rockefeller insisted that his name not be used anywhere on campus, even rejecting an image of a lamp on the university seal, lest it be taken as a suggestion of the influence of Standard Oil. At the urging of Frederick T. Gates, perhaps his most trusted philanthropic adviser, Rockefeller became increasingly devoted to medical research.

The results were dramatic. Today, known as the Rockefeller University, it is one of the leading biomedical research centers in the world. Twenty-four Nobel Prize winners have served on its faculty. Like many wealthy industrialists of his era, Rockefeller was scandalized by the poverty and deprivation that still afflicted the American South nearly half a century after the conclusion of the Civil War.

He created the General Education Board in , charging it with a ranging mission that included improving rural education for both whites and blacks, modernizing agricultural practices, and improving public health, primarily through efforts to eradicate hookworm, which debilitated many Southerners and dragged down productivity of all sorts.

The General Education Board helped establish hundreds of public high schools throughout the South, promoted institutions of higher education, and supported teacher-training efforts for African Americans. Starting in , the campaign against hookworm was exported globally.

It was soon followed by similar efforts against malaria, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and typhus, all under the auspices of the Rockefeller-funded International Health Commission.

The technology used by Drake was not new. What was new was the idea of drilling for oil -- the idea that you could pump oil out of the ground like you could pump water. The technology for drilling wells was quite advanced by To that time, wells were drilled for either water or salt more accurately, brine which would be refined to get the salt.

In the process of drilling for salt all over the United States in the early 19th century it was not uncommon -- especially in the Pennsylvania area — to get oil seepage into the salt well. Most of the time this was regarded as a nuisance, but some enterprising merchants went into the business of selling the oil in small bottles as a "Natural Remedy" or "Curative Agent. The technology for refining oil was also known by the early s. Doctor Abraham Gesner, a Canadian, in August patented a method for distilling kerosene a name he invented from the Greek "keros" — wax — and "elaion" — oil from coal.

In , a Scottish industrial chemist, James Young, patented a method of obtaining "burning oils" from petroleum through destructive distillation. In two Boston chemists, Luther and William Atwood, began making lubricants from coal tar. Finally, in , Samuel Downer, a whale-oil merchant, bought out the Atwoods and boosted production to , gallons of refined oil a year. By , coal-oil lamps were widespread and coal-oil was even made in Cleveland. Samuel Adams had experience with shale-oil refining, and Clark brought in his brothers.

This immediately gave Cleveland a transportation advantage over Pittsburgh, which was dominated by the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Pennsylvania oil was of high quality. Rockefeller abhorred waste and devoted considerable energy to increasing the efficiency of his refining business. He believed that the secret of success was attention to detail — to wringing little efficiencies out of every aspect of his business.

He hired his own plumber and bought his own plumbing supplies. He built his own cooperage shop and made his own barrels for the oil.

He bought tracts of white-oak timber for making the barrels. Instead of transporting the freshly cut green timber directly to the cooperage shop, he had kilns built on the timber tracts to dry the wood on site, to reduce the shipping weight of the lumber.

He bought his own wagons and horses to transport the wood to the cooperage shop in Cleveland. We would call this "vertical integration" today. The Clarks had resisted borrowing money to expand and Rockefeller was convinced of the correctness of his course.

He immediately moved to greatly extend his enterprise. He borrowed heavily and plowed all his profits back into the business in order to expand it further, and took decisive steps to strengthen and increase the efficiency of all aspects of the firm. In , John D. They also opened a New York City office with William Rockefeller in charge, to handle the export business, which eventually became larger than the domestic business.

Henry M. Flagler In , Henry M. Flagler had left school at age Not wanting to burden his poor family any further, he walked to the Erie Canal in and took it to Lake Erie, and then went to Ohio via a lake steamer.

Flagler and Rockefeller had met years earlier in Bellevue, Ohio, when Rockefeller was buying grain for his commission house and Flagler was a grain merchant. Flagler had gone into the salt well business but went broke in He began to recoup his fortune in in Cleveland as a manufacturer of oil barrels and had an office in the same building as Rockefeller.

Flagler and Rockefeller were very much alike -- ambitious and shrewd, with a taste for expansion. Flager's wife's uncle, Stephen V.

Harkness, became a silent partner and made substantial investments in the partnership, though he never took an active part in running the business. These investments by Harkness and Flagler were used to expand the business even further. Flagler and Rockefeller understood that the only way to make profits consistently in oil refining was to make the business as large as possible and to utilize all their "waste" products.

The refining process during this early period was very primitive -- refining consisted simply of cooking the oil and purifying it somewhat. The physical plant was simple: some large vats, stills, the piping, and a few chemicals. In modern language, the barriers to entry were very, very low. It would be like setting up a small business in today's business climate.

Consequently, if the price of kerosene was high, even the small and inefficient refiners could make good money. So, even when the price of kerosene fell sharply, driving some refiners out of business, the entry costs were so low that when times were good many small operators could enter the business cheaply, making it a very competitive market.

It was the logic of this competitive structure that determined Rockefeller and Flagler's course of action. In short, nothing was left to chance, nothing was guessed at, nothing left uncounted and measured. Efficiencies down to the smallest detail of the business were the order of the day. Economy, precision, and foresight were the cornerstones of their success. Consequently, Flagler was able to negotiate big rebates from the railroads.

The combination of size, efficiency, and the rebates gave Rockefeller and Flagler an advantage over other refiners that they would never relinquish. The railroad situation benefited not only Rockefeller and Flagler; other Cleveland refiners also benefited at the expense of the refiners in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh was a prisoner to the Pennsylvania Railroad, which had a monopoly in that city. The Pennsylvania Railroad wanted to ship everything to Philadelphia because it meant more money for them. Consequently, Cleveland refiners had a built-in advantage over Pittsburgh. In this regard, the railroads — the Erie and New York Central -- were not "victims" of the "crooked" refiners; rather, the railroads looked upon the refiners as associates and co-workers. They had a commonality of interests.

In Rockefeller's eyes, the state of the oil business was chaotic. Because entry costs were so low in both oil drilling and oil refining, the market was glutted with crude oil with an accompanying high level of waste.

In his view, the theory of free competition did not work well when there was a mix of very large, efficient firms and many medium and small firms. His view was that the weak firms, in their attempts to survive, drove prices down below production costs, hurting even the well-managed firms such as his own.

Although his economics may be suspect in modern eyes, his solution -- a market with a few maybe one! What makes oil stand out is that it happened by design -- as the result of a plan formulated by a single person — John D. During , Rockefeller formulated his plan for consolidating all oil refining firms into one great organization with the aim of eliminating excess capacity and price-cutting. Although no written records exist, both Rockefeller and Flagler 30 years later claimed this was when they worked out the master plan, which they later implemented.

The claim that the plan was formulated in is evidenced by the fact that all the major Cleveland banks joined the Standard Oil organization in and later backed Rockefeller and Flagler to the hilt in their rapid expansion. Tom Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad came up with the idea.

The scheme was inspired by the Anthracite Railroad combination of in which five railroads and two coal companies bought up all the coal pits along the five railroads in order to control output and prices. The South Improvement Company had been created by the Pennsylvania Legislature in and its charter allowed the Company to hold the stocks of other companies outside the state. This was an unusual power at the time and made it ideal for Scott's scheme.

Scott arranged for the purchase of the charter by a group of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh refiners with Scott in the background. The scheme was essentially a plan to unite the oil-carrying railroads in a pool; to unite the refiners in an association, the South Improvement Company; and to tie the two elements together by agreements which would stop "destructive" price-cutting and restore railroad freight charges to a profitable level.

To enforce the cooperation of refiners, a set of rebates was agreed to for participating refiners. This alone would have undoubtedly forced all the refiners into the combine, but the scheme did not stop there. In what turned out to be a public relations disaster, the participants decided to add a drawback on every barrel shipped by a non-participant equal to the ordinary rebate.

In effect, this would be a tax on non-participants, the proceeds of which would be transferred to the participating oil refiners. What the planners forgot, however, was to include the producers in the scheme as well. Despite efforts to reassure the drillers in the Oil Regions that the scheme would benefit them as well by keeping prices up, the Oil Regions Men revolted and organized an effective boycott of all the refiners and railroads they suspected of being part of the scheme.

Consequently, the scheme collapsed in before it was ever implemented. Subsequent historians repeated the view of many at the time that Rockefeller had been one of the originators of the South Improvement Scheme. In fact he had not been, but he and Flagler did agree to participate, and worked hard to set up the scheme.

To help manage his philanthropy, he hired the Rev. Frederick T. With the advice of Gates and his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr. In JDR founded the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research now The Rockefeller University for the purpose of discovering the causes, manner of prevention, and the cure of disease. A few of the noted achievements of its scientists are the serum treatment of spinal meningitis and of pneumonia; knowledge of the cause and manner of infection in infantile paralysis; the nature of the virus causing epidemic influenza; blood vessel surgery; a treatment for African sleeping sickness; the first demonstration of the preservation of whole blood for subsequent transfusion; the first demonstration of how nerve cells flow from the brain to other areas of the body; the discovery that a virus can cause cancer in fowl; peptide synthesis; and the identification of DNA as the crucial genetic material.

In the south, where there was special need, the GEB helped schools for both white and African-American students. In JDR combined his special interest in the U. Its purposse was to fund a cooperative movement to cure and prevent hookworm disease, which was especially devastating in the southern states.

The commission launched a massive campaign of public education and medication in 11 states. It paid the salaries of field personnel, who were appointed jointly by the states and the commission, and it sponsored public education campaigns and the treatment of infected individuals.

As part of this program, more than 25, public meetings were attended by more than 2 million people who were educated about hookworm and its prevention. Its early field research on hookworm, malaria, and yellow fever provided the basic techniques to control these diseases and established the pattern of modern public health services. Its agricultural development program in Mexico led to the Green Revolution in the advancement of global food production, and the foundation provided significant funding for the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.

Thousands of scientists and scholars from throughout the world have received fellowships and scholarships for advanced study. Rockefeller married Laura C. Spelman, a teacher, on September 8, , in Cleveland. In the s, JDR began to make business trips to New York, and soon he started bringing his family for lengthy stays.