Natural Gas – 100 Years Ago Today, January 13, 1923!
Tom Shepstone
Shepstone Management Company, Inc.
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Natural gas news from a hundred years ago offers great perspective for discussing one of the cleanest sources of energy available then and still today.
I thought it might be fun and illuminating to look back 100 years ago at what was happening with natural gas. It is eye opening, given all we’ve learned over the last century. There is, indeed, little new under the sun, as our stories repeatedly demonstrate. Natural Gas – 100 Years Ago Today, January 13, 1923. Read our 100-year old news items on the subjects of eating cake, drilling successes, bad predictions, a big oil strike and an okie from Muskogee.
You Can’t Eat Your Cake And Have It, Too?
Well, not when it comes to natural gas, although Peoples Natural Gas certainly didn’t want you wasting it in 1923:
13 Nov 1923, Tue Altoona Tribune (Altoona, Pennsylvania) Newspapers.com
Nor did other gas companies who were in constant fear of running out, not understanding the basics of resource economics; that scarcity produces high prices and high prices stimulates more exploration and development that increases the supply and lowers prices.
And, For More of the Same
Yes, the folks in New York also expected to be tight as to supplies:
13 Nov 1923, Tue Dunkirk Evening Observer (Dunkirk, New York) Newspapers.com
Today, of course, the problem in New York is not a failure to understand resource economics, but a failure in governance brought on by past successes that made the Empire State an urban one where the most that most voters understand about energy is the ability to set the thermostat.
This Is Way One Should Never Do Predictions
The expert class has always assumed it was smart, not just about its own professions, but everyone’s else (a/k/a the fatal conceit) and that’s why we get stupid predictions like this repeatedly over the years:
13 Nov 1923, Tue Springfield News-Sun (Springfield, Ohio) Newspapers.com
The reality is that natural gas prices today are but a fraction of what they were in real inflation dollars in 1923. The engineer shouldn’t have ventured into economics.
From Short-Sighted Economics to “Invest Now!”
The proof of why scarcity in natural resources ultimately produces abundance may be found below:
13 Nov 1923, Tue The Vancouver Sun (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) Newspapers.com
Risk taking is what old-fashioned capitalism (not the phony stakeholder capitalism we see today) is all about and this is what yields progress.
Become An Okie from Muskogee!
Notice “abundant natural Gas for farm and domestic use.” Need we see more?
13 Nov 1923, Tue The Kansas City Times (Kansas City, Missouri) Newspapers.com
That’s Merle gave us this:
And I’m proud to be an Okie from Muskogee
A place where even squares can have a ball;
We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse
White lightning’s still the biggest thrill of all
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