Kerosene did not save the sperm whale (2024)
50 comments
·April 4, 2025creddit
potato3732842
The bit about the usefulness for lubrication is fairly wrong. To put it simply, it's useful because it's a corrosion inhibitor. And while it works it degrades pretty rapidly in a hot gearbox. Synthetic alternatives were simply better. And they were developed and gaining traction before the ban, because they were better. Industrial machinery mostly doesn't need those properties. Whale oil is a poor lubricant by itself though it can look decent if your frame of reference is what's available in the 1860s.
Between what you found and what I found I think the whole thing is kinda sus.
Edit: To clarify, Whale oil is hydroscopic-ish but in a weird way, not like glycol (I'm not a chemist so IDK). My understanding is that it makes some sort of film that's protective against condensation. Gearboxes operated outdoors don't generally need this corrosion inhibitor. It has to do with the glues used on or in automatic transmission friction material and how very sensitive they are to water. You can't have water building up from ambient conditions and short trips or they'll delaminate. Your alternatives without something like this are rivets or different glue, both of which perform worse and cost more.
kmt-lnh
The synthetic alternatives became better only much later. A blast from the past, from the old web, wher e competence meets ugly web design:
"It was true that increased heat load destroyed the modified sperm oil in the ATF faster. The problem was that its freshly developed synthetic analogs were performing even worse. Only in the 1980s, a chemical solution to this problem was found, and I highly doubt that it could have been found earlier. Now we have the pieces of the story:
Sperm whales use unusual rheological properties of wax esters in order to control buoyancy, and these properties also make such chemicals an ideal lubricant for extreme pressure applications. When the world relied on whales as a source of hydrocarbons, these were too expensive to use as fuels, and the demand was self-limiting. When the whales were “saved” by petrochemical industry, it was only a short respite. Petrol-powered machinery required new types of lubricants that increased rather than decreased the reliance on sperm oil. Petroleum was plentiful, the cars filled the world, and it is at that point that the whales began to disappear. Literally nothing was done to save these whales until the cars evolved to the point when the engines started to operate at a higher temperature; the latter was caused by the concern about human health and efficiency rather than the well being of these whales."
timdiggerm
His overall point, that it happened later, after different technological innovations, and required government regulation is correct though
potato3732842
I think government regulation probably only advanced the inevitable. Synthetic substitutes were developed for performance (temperature tolerance and service life). It was likely only a matter of time until said substitutes made their way back into older specifications for oil due to natural economic incentives.
Perhaps there would still be some niche whaling if not for the ban, but it would be for a niche use, not because literally every automatic transmission in the country needs a cup of the stuff.
hinkley
Recall that sea shanty business a few years ago with the talk of the Weller Brothers, a NZ outfit that delivered supplies to whaling vessels so they did not have to return to harbor as frequently.
The implication of the song is that the Weller Brothers would provide supplies on credit based on the progress of the whaling expedition. The sailers are singing about capturing a whale that leads to hopes of resupply coming soon.
Less time traveling back and forth to hunting grounds is more time for violence, and that’s the calculus of the whole sordid business.
giraffe_lady
Moby Dick itself contains a ton of factual errors (even accounting for the state of knowledge contemporary to its writing) about whales and whaling. I think in this case it still points you in the right direction but that's mostly just luck.
And it is mostly focused on the habits of one particular whale fishery. Others are discussed but not in depth and the bias of the narrator in regard to them is itself an important part of the story. I don't know either way but it's plausible to me that other fisheries, positioned closer to their whaling grounds, would have dragged them back for processing.
creddit
Many of the factual errors are there on purpose. The lengthy discussion of whether or not whales are fish for example is not intended to be scientific.
Melville himself served on a whaler and AFAIK the descriptions of actual whaling and processing of whales at sea are basically accurate with some embellishment. Open to being wrong about that though as I am by no means an 1800s whaling expert.
giraffe_lady
The whale is a fish thing isn't what I had in mind, iirc that's a solid argument that still mostly holds up.
It's been a long time, I read it right after reading the Eric Dolin book about american whaling and coming out of that some of the details about nantucket and its fleet & practices at that time were off but I'm not going to be able to come up with citations on anything.
He also messes with some of the shipboard social dynamics for the sake of the story, uses names for some of the positions that were not used in the american whaling fleet, shifts responsibility for certain things around so they'll land on named characters, standard literary moves like that.
It's probable that all of these were intentional to serve the story. And I'm not an expert either which makes simple embellishment hard to spot. I'm mostly just pointing out that asserting what anyone "knows" about whales from reading moby dick is tricky.
lukan
What kind of errors are there? I don't remember anything standing out.
gosub100
We don't let the facts get in the way of a "government regulation good" story.
legitster
The Soviet union had an outsized role in this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whaling_in_the_Soviet_Union_an...
To meet lucrative production quotas, the Soviet Union lied to international agencies about how many whales they were catching. While they didn't harvest the most amount of whales in the 20th century, they disregarded treaties that protected endangered whales and breeding populations.
https://www.i-deel.org/blog/mass-killing-for-no-reason-the-p...
The worst part is there was little to no actual demand for whaling products in the Soviet Union, so most of they collected was treated as a waste product or simply dumped.
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RandallBrown
The graph kinda does show that kerosene saved the sperm whale doesn't it? Whaling went down for like 60 years before spiking once cars became a thing. I imagine electric lighting also helped out.
hinkley
I was at a meeting and was sitting next to a guy whose company made an on-premise clone of parts of AWS. By the end of that conversation I came to find out that a lot of their funding came from Amazon.
A lot of people will walk into a trap. Some, once in it, will thrash to get out of it. Even if they hurt themselves in the process, they gain their freedom. Other people, seeing an escape route, will happily or at least grudgingly stay a while longer. Which then doesn’t warn off observers from making the same mistake.
If it makes sense for AWS to fund a “competitor”, then it makes sense for whale oil lamp sellers to cheer for an alternative fuel because the users can think, “we can always switch to kerosene”. And I’ve seen too many people who want to try something at least once while they still have the chance to experience it.
buildsjets
NYT 1975: Transmission Problems in Cars Linked to Ban on Whale Killing
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/17/archives/transmission-pro...
didgetmaster
The title and much of the article suggests that sperm whale might be extinct today.
While their population is down from estimates before whaling in the nineteen century; current estimates are about half a million of them are swimming around the globe today.
dr_dshiv
What are other counterintuitive stories like this? (Regardless of veracity)
* Kerosene saves the whales
* Plastics saves the elephants
* Coal saved the forests
Other similar stories?
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Kerosene did save the sperm whale.
And the author missed the reason:
> As I mentioned earlier, right from the start whale oil had other uses, beyond lighting. It was used to grease naval clocks, as well as being deployed in pharmaceuticals, paints and explosives.
Kerosene replaced the widespread, low margin, highly price sensitive use of spermaceti oil.
If the common person is using spermaceti oil for light every single day, there is no politically tenable way you can restrict the supply.
Kerosene replaces that, and now the common person doesn't really know or care about spermaceti oil.
Notice also the other use cases are generally higher up in the value chain than just burning it for light. Naval clocks, pharmaceuticals, paints, explosives. In addition, the users are more concentrated. Everybody burned spermaceti oil for lamps. There are only a few places that make naval clocks, pharmaceuticals, paints, and explosives. And they have the ability to absorb R&D costs for different lubricants because that is a high value use case.
A similar example of this is CFCs being banned. They were used in high value use cases with a limited amount of users. And even there, there was pushback with regard to home AC units - things that affected the common people.
The lesson we should take from this is that we need technology to provide us with alternatives for the common, price sensitive, widespread uses of something, before it becomes tenable to enact any type of supply restriction on it.
And then we can rely on the high value use cases finding alternatives.
potato3732842
The article goes on to make the same error again though.
If the common person's automatic transmission needs whale oil you can't ban it.
The kind of oil that can be produced in the conditions of a mammal's body tends to not hold up to well in a 300deg automatic transmission. Synthetic oil was developed because using a factory to do "this can't happen in a body" things to tree oil results in a superior performing product. These products were adopted because they're better. And then there was little need to use whale oil, so it got banned at which point the synthetic new hotness got back ported into the older specifications of oil.
matthewdgreen
You seem to have a strong claim you'd like to make on this point. It might be true, but it's a claim offered without much evidence.
I guess one thing I'd be curious about is: were non-synthetic non-animal alternatives substituted for whale oil in large quantities before synthetics took over? If so, that would be one data point in favor of the idea that regulation (and possibly the decline of the species) was the driving factor, rather than the superiority of synthetics.
wazoox
The book ("Material World") is fantastic, I hope he'll make another tome on some other resources :)
scop
Obligatory comment: Moby Dick is a work of stunning glory and if you think you can abridge it you are missing the entire point.
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aaron695
[dead]
Anyone who has read Moby Dick knows that this passage:
> And since whaling technology had come along so much since the 19th century - with powerful diesel engined vessels equipped with ever more lethal harpoons and even onboard processing plants, allowing sailors to drain the spermaceti out of their catches at sea rather than having to bring them back to land - sperm whale populations were ravaged long, long after the discovery of kerosene.
contains a distinct factual error. The whalers were processing their catch at sea even in the 1800s. Probably not as efficiently, but still they were not dragging their catch back to land for processing.