Mobile Gas history

The company’s origins date to 1863, when Rockefeller joined Maurice B. Clark and Samuel Andrews in a Cleveland, Ohio, oil-refining business.

Vacuum got its start in 1866 when Matthew Ewing, a carpenter and part-time inventor in Rochester, New York, devised a new method of distilling kerosene from oil using a vacuum.

By 1867, when a young man of exceptional talent named Henry Flagler became a third partner, the firm was already operating the world's number one oil refinery; there was as yet little oil produced outside the United States.

Because of Standard's great volume--60 carloads a day by 1869--it was able to win lucrative rebates from the warring railroads.

By 1873 Standard Oil was refining more oil--10,000 barrels per day--than any other region of the country, employing 1,600 workers, and netting around $500,000 per year.

By 1880, through elimination of competitors, mergers with other firms, and use of favourable railroad rebates, it controlled the refining of 90 to 95 percent of all oil produced in the United States.

Jersey's Bayonne, New Jersey refinery was soon the third largest in the Standard family, putting out 10,000 to 12,000 barrels per day by 1886.

1888: Standard founds its first foreign affiliate, Anglo-American Oil Company, Limited.

S.S. McClure, founder of McClure’s Magazine, hired her in 1894.

Rockefeller had retired from daily participation in Standard Oil in 1896 at the age of 56.

In 1899, however, the company renamed its New Jersey firm Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) and incorporated it as a holding company.

The articles also helped to define a growing trend of investigation, exposé, and crusading in liberal journals of the day, a technique that in 1906 United States Pres.

Socony eventually built a network of subsidiaries from Japan to Turkey that by 1910 was handling nearly 50 percent of the kerosene sold in Asia.

When the Standard Oil Trust was broken up by the Supreme Court (1911), two of its divisions – the Standard Oil Company of New York and the Vacuum Oil Company – merged.

In 1918 Socony bought 45 percent of Magnolia Petroleum Company, which owned wells, pipelines, and a refinery in Beaumont, Texas, and did most of its marketing in Texas and the Southwest.

In 1919, however, Jersey made a domestic purchase that would prove to be of great long-term value.

Under his direction the firm prospered, and he was made chairman of the board in 1923.

Although Henry died just as construction began in 1930, Emily oversaw the completion of the library and assisted with funding in the midst of the Great Depression, personally contributing millions of dollars to the completion of the project.

The latter companies, in need of both capital for expansion and world markets for exploitation, sold 30 percent of the newly formed Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) to Jersey and 10 percent to Socony-Vacuum in 1946.

In 1950 that proportion was about the same, indicating that regardless of the end products into which oil was refined, it was the production of crude that yielded the big profits.

1960: Mobil Chemical Company is formed.

For Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), which had changed its name to Exxon in 1972, the oil embargo had several major effects.

In 1973, however, OPEC placed an embargo on oil shipments to the United States for six months and began gradual annexation of United States-owned oil properties.

In an effort to diversify beyond its oil holdings, Mobil in 1974 acquired 54 percent of the voting shares of Marcor Inc. (then the parent company of Container Corporation of America and Montgomery Ward & Co.), and two years later Marcor merged into Mobil.

Industry observers were expecting Raymond to retire at some point midway through the decade, and the consensus on his replacement was Rex Tillerson, who joined Exxon in 1975.

1980: Exxon's revenues exceed $100 billion because of the rapid increase in oil prices.

With the price of oil peaking around 1981 and then tumbling for most of the decade, Exxon's sales dropped sharply.

Although these efforts succeeded, in large part, in replacing Mobil's reserves as fast as they were used up, the company bought Superior Oil Company in 1984.

To make ends meet, Chairman Rawleigh Warner, Jr., and his 1986 successor, Allen E. Murray, made substantial cuts in refineries and service stations, upgrading Mobil's holdings of both to a smaller number of more modern, efficient units.

In 1989 it contributed 32 percent of Mobil's net operating income--generated on sales representing less than 7 percent of the corporate total.

1990: Exxon's headquarters are moved from Rockefeller Center in New York City to Irving, Texas.

Asset sales of $570 million in 1991 included a Wyoming coal mine and hundreds of wells in western Texas.

At the end of 1993 Lee R. Raymond took over as CEO from the retiring Rawl.

In June 1994 a federal jury found that the huge oil spill had been caused by "recklessness" on the part of Exxon.

In 1995 profits jumped to an estimated $1.9 billion (in large part driven by Mobil's 30 percent stake in the rich Indonesian Arun field, which contributed one-quarter of that figure); as a result, Mobil ranked number one in the industry in terms of profitability.

In 1996 the company reported net income of $7.51 billion, more than any other company on the Fortune 500.

In June 1997, in fact, Exxon formally appealed the $5 billion verdict.

In December 1998 Exxon agreed to buy Mobil for about $75 billion in what promised to be one of the largest takeovers ever.

Mobil Corporation, former American petroleum and chemical company that joined with Exxon in 1999 to form Exxon Mobil Corporation.

By 2001, cost savings from the merger reached $4.6 billion.