The history of Mobil

John Rockefeller

The history of the Exxonmobil group, according to its official website, begins in 1859, when Edwin Drake and Billy Smith drilled the first successful oil well in the state of Pennsylvania. That moment kicked off a huge oil rush in the USA.

In 1870, John Rockefeller, together with his partner Henry Flagler, founded the oil company Standard Oil Company, which over time came to control more than 90% of oil refining and over 30% of oil production in the USA. The biggest acquisition deal came in 1879, with the purchase, for 200,000 dollars, of three-quarters of the shares of Vacuum Oil, a company founded by Matthew Ewing and Hiram Everest in 1866 after they patented an invented technology for producing lubricants by vacuum distillation of kerosene. It's precisely the companies Jersey Standard and Vacuum Oil, both controlled at the time by the Standard Oil Company, that are considered the forebears of today's giant Exxonmobil group.

At the start of the 20th century, Rockefeller gradually handed control of the group's companies over to his partners and threw himself actively into philanthropy. On top of that, in 1911 the US Supreme Court, following an antitrust investigation, ruled to split the Standard Oil Company into 34 separate companies, two of which — Jersey Standard and Vacuum Oil — would reunite 88 years later into the famous Exxonmobil group.