Natural Gas – 100 Years Ago Today, July 15, 1922!
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 and, of course, there is little new under the sun. Consider these 100-year old news items (emphasis added):
- No…Printer’s Ink Made from Natural Gas?
- Summer, Winter, All Year Long, Natural Gas Is No Fickle Friend!
- Simply Going Bananas for Natural Gas?
- The Well Comes In for Detroit Summerfield – Hallelujah!
No…Printer’s Ink Made from Natural Gas?
This story reminds us that natural gas has produced so many good things and even yielded the ink writers used to both condemn and praise it. Newspapers are increasingly irrelevant today, but the cell phone, the computer and the television that now share the news are just as dependent on natural gas, which is how the plastics in all these things are produced.
15 Jul 1922, Sat The Tampa Times (Tampa, Florida) Newspapers.com
Natural gas is also the fuel used yet today to dry anti-fracking messages printed on tee-shirts and to produce those trendy over-priced vinyl jackets con-artist clothing companies sell to millennials, yuppies and the other latest iterations of spoiled rich kids who pride themselves on their superior morals and intelligence.
Summer, Winter, All Year Long, Natural Gas Is No Fickle Friend!
Here’s a nice ad demonstrating the diverse uses of natural gas to which America was awakening in 1922:
15 Jul 1922, Sat The Courier-Gazette (McKinney, Texas) Newspapers.com
Brings to mind some words sung by the immortal crooner from Hoboken:
The autumn wind, and the winter winds they have come and gone
And still the days, those lonely days, they go on and on
And guess who sighs his lullabies through nights that never end
My fickle friend, the summer wind
The summer wind
Warm summer wind
The summer wind
There’s nothing fickle about natural gas, though. It’s been a reliable friend for more than a century. A summer friend, a winter friend, a friend forever.
Simply Going Bananas for Natural Gas?
This is a humorous story demonstrating just how cheap natural gas was in 1922 and it’s been even cheaper in recent years, relatively speaking, although Biden policies have raised the cost enormously recently:
15 Jul 1922, Sat The Oregon Daily Journal (Portland, Oregon) Newspapers.com
Growing bananas in Kansas in 1922? What can’t natural gas do?
The Well Comes In for Detroit Summerfield – Hallelujah!
The sheer excitement of oil and gas drilling is conveyed in article after article in the 1922 press, as this example illustrates:
15 Jul 1922, Sat Daily Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock, Arkansas) Newspapers.com
The thrill of the chase is a big part of the oil and gas culture yet today. It’s still about discovery, risk-taking and other extremely real stuff during a period of history (the 21st Century) when so much is contrived, phony and corrupt, yet the spirit of the early days remains strong in this one industry.
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