This little calculation is enough to show that the day of the railroads as long-distance transporters of crude oil was over; that the pipe-lines were bound to replace them. Now, Mr. Rockefeller had by ten years of effort made the roads his servant; would he be able to control the new carrier? A man of lesser intellect might not have foreseen the inevitableness of the new situation; a man of lesser courage would not have sprung to meet it. Mr. Rockefeller, however, is like all great generals: he never fails to foresee where the battle is to be fought; he never fails to get the choice of positions. He wasted no time now in deciding what should be done. He proposed not merely to control future long-distance oil transportation; he proposed to own it outright.
Hardly had the news of the success of the Tidewater's experiment reached the Standard before this truly Napoleonic decision was being carried out. Mr. Rockefeller had secured a right of way from the Bradford field to Bayonne, New Jersey, and was laying a seaboard pipe-line of his own. At the same time he set out to acquire a right of way to Philadelphia, and soon a line to that point was under construction. Even before these seaboard lines were ready, pipes had been laid from the Oil Regions to the Standard's inland refining points—Cleveland, Buffalo and Pittsburg. With the completion of this system Mr. Rockefeller would be independent of the railroads as far as the transportation of crude oil was concerned. It was, of course, a new department in his business, and, to manage it, a new company was organised in April, 1881—the National Transit Company—with a capital of five million dollars, and a charter of historical interest, for it was a mate of the charter of the ill-fated South Improvement Company, granted by the same Legislature and giving the same omnibus privileges—the right in fact to do any kind of business, except banking, in any part of the world. The South Improvement Company charter, as we have seen, was repealed. The charter
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