Ludwig Nobel

"Ludwig Nobel, after a highly successful career as a St. Petersburg manufacturer, literally created the Russian oil industry which in turn fueled the tremendous economic expansion of prerevolutionary Russia. He designed the world’s first oil tanker and had a dozen in regular service before other nations followed his lead; he installed Europe’s first pipelines and put the first tankcars on its rails; he built the world’s first full-scale continuous distillation refinery and developed oil burners to utilize more efficiently the black gold pouring from the world’s first gushers; he forged a gigantic infrastructure on water and land, overcoming native inertia and a stubborn opposition, building a network of storage depots and tank farms, harbors, freightyards, and marketing outlets from one end of the vast Russian empire to the other and then across the European continent and into the British Isles."