ing over the oil industry, other oilmen went out of business. Consequently, the railroads that carried the oil needed Rockefeller’s freight more than ever. Rockefeller was a very intelligent businessman. He arranged for two very big railroads passing through Cleveland to compete for his large business. He did this by bargaining and threatening one or the other railroad, telling them that he might give all of his business to the other. This method worked. He finally forced the railroads to charge him lower prices than they charged anybody else. By confidential dealings he pretended to pay the regular rates. Then later the railroads gave him back a "rebate," which was a refund on each barrel of his oil that they had hauled. Shortly, they even gave him rebates on what opposing oil companies shipped. After he perfected these tactics, he went to the small refineries in other parts of the country, and asked them to sell their companies to him. He would say, "If you don’t sell your property it will be valueless, because we have advantages with the railroads." Rockefeller would then offer them a much lower price for the refinery then the owners thought it was worth. Still the refineries would sell because they knew the mass power that Rockefeller had and how he could put them out of business easily. After a while it became cheaper to pump oil through pipelines instead of packaging it in barrels. As a result, Rockefeller created his own pipeline. Rockefeller’s great business in the oil industry had even reached around the world. For example, in China "Standard Oil" sold millions of inexpensive oil lamps and then sold the oil to fill them with. As time passed on people all over the world were using oil from American wells. Now Americans could afford a lamp in every room, and they did not have to go to bed at sunset anymore. By the 1900s, little did Rockefeller know that the whole nation would be moving on wheels. The car was inv...
