To understand the emulsifying process, we must first accept the scientific principle that oil and water do not naturally mix. Quite literally, they find each other’s presence repulsive. A good illustration of this aversion is homemade oil-and-vinegar salad dressing. When you shake or beat your salad dressing, you do more than disperse the oil throughout [...]
An important new industry, oil refining, grew after the Civil War. Crude oil, or petroleum — a dark, thick ooze from the earth — had been known for hundreds of years, but little use had ever been made of it. In the 1850’s Samuel M. Kier, a manufacturer in western Pennsylvania, began collecting the oil [...]
The invention of the incandescent light bulb by Thomas A. Edison in 1879 created a demand for a cheap, readily available fuel with which to generate large amounts of electric power. Coal seemed to fit the bill, and it fueled the earliest power stations (which were set up at the end of the nineteenth century [...]
Since there is such an abundance of food in the sea, it is understandable that some of the efficient, highly adaptable, warm-blooded mammals that evolved on land should have returned to the sea. Those that did have flourished. Within about 50 million years — no time at all, geologically speaking — one of the four [...]
