Gargoyle

If the oil industry has not yet turned that corner 'round which prophets have been trying to squint for several months, nevertheless 9,300 Vacuum oil stockholders were reassured last week that their great lubricating oil company was in a better state of financial health than the ailing gasoline companies. The morning's mail brought announcement of a 100% stock dividend, worth $367,328,304 at the market price of the stock.

Vacuum has always been generous to stockholders out of veneration for its creator, late Hiram B. Everest,* Rochester, N. Y. farmer, himself a poor man, and generous like all poor men.

At the close of the Civil War, Farmer Hiram was a failure. He loved to raise apples. But his apples rotted. His farm went to ruin and unrepair. The harness fell apart. Inventor Everest, always of a studious, enquiring drift of mind, tried some of Mr. John. D. Rockefeller's newfangled Pennsylvania fluid called petroleum on the harness. It softened, unstiffened. Manufacturer Everest built a small still near his barn, made harness dressing, sold it, prospered a little, but was utterly ruined by a patent suit establishing that somebody else had previously made harness dressing in the same kind of still.

Litigant Everest turned to his abandoned harness-oil still. He thought of trying petroleum for mechanical lubrication. Only wax and vegetable oils were then in use. Modern lubrication science was born at the barn. The Rochester oil business soon became too vast for Hiram Everest. Responsibility of management told on him. The Standard Oil Company bought him out at a small price, throwing in a job with a small salary, a nominal job as President of the Vacuum/- Oil Co. with nothing much to do. President Everest continued to raise apples on his farm outside Rochester.

Young sales managers with bright ideas searched through books on mythology for an international trade-mark intelligible to all nations in all languages, for Vacuum oil lubricating supply stations were dotting the earth, even to imperceptible islands of distant seas. The bright young men hit on the roc, huge bird that took Sindbad's baggy pants in its beak and carried him across mountains to drop him into a gully full of diamonds. But here a language difficulty arose. Roc sounds like rock. In German petroleum is rock-oil (Steinoel). Most unfortunately the bird of Persian mythology would not do. Medieval France was then scanned. A suitably universal monster was found adorning every Gothic Cathedral, fighting off devils. Gargoyle, therefore, became synonymous for lubricating oil wherever Christian church architecture is known. The management of the Vacuum Oil Co., disliking puns, noticed too late that the unfortunate rhyme between "oyle" and oil. Gargoyle was already on countless billboards, luring motorists, drawing business. Last year Vacuum's earnings, it was allowed to be understood last week, were equal to, if not more than the $24,133,655 of 1926, whereas the great Standard of New York showed a decline in earnings for 1927 as compared with 1926 of from $32,776,502 to $16,327,048.

*Died 1913, aged 83, founded Vacuum Oil Company 1866, retired from business 1870, sold Vacuum to Standard Oil Company 1880.

/-From the then new, now abandoned, process of distilling lubricating oils in a vacuum.