Rockefeller

Rockefeller was born in 1839 in western New York. After graduating from high school in 1855, John Rockefeller entered the workforce on the bottom rung of the ladder as a bookkeeper in a Cleveland shipping firm. Always thrifty, he saved enough money to start his own business. When the Civil War came, the demand for his goods increased dramatically, and Rockefeller amassed himself a small fortune.

Rockefeller introduced techniques that totally reshaped the oil industry. In the mid-19th century, the chief demand was for kerosene. He even sold off other "waste" as paving materials for roads. He shipped so many goods that railroad companies competed over the prospect of getting his business.

Rockefeller necessitated rebates from the railroads. He used all these methods to reduce the price of oil to his consumers. His profits soared and his competitors were crushed one by one. Rockefeller forced smaller companies to surrender their stock to his control. Rockefeller saw the cutthroat competition in the oil industry as a ruinous influence and began to methodically stamp it out. Under his firm hand by 1890 Rockefeller's company, Standard Oil of Ohio, was well ahead of the industry and enjoying a high profit margin. He used these profits to buy out competitors.

Rockefeller decided to get his sprawling empire in order. He and his partners created a trust, the first of its kind, where they swapped their individual holdings for shares in the trust. Rockefeller now had centralized control and a veto on all the corporate boards within his conglomerate. The immediate benefits included even lower costs, lower kerosene prices and standardization across the industry. Rockefeller's company now had the size to build pipelines and other infrastructure on a scale previously unthinkable.

However, these are also the reasons that people consider his empire to be amoral and “evil”. A lot of the techniques he used to build up his empire are now illegal. His push towards...