by Rebecca Altman -- the Atlantic
Created by a globetrotter, the 55-gallon barrel became one of the best-traveled inventions in human history.
“For a time in American history ... they were everywhere.”..It made me think of Nellie Bly aboard the Augusta Victoria—hands gripped at the boat rails, rocked green by the Atlantic. Bly was the investigative journalist who in 1889—at the dawning of the Oil Age—went on to circumnavigate the globe and then invent the prototype for the modern steel drum...
She founded the American Steel Barrel Company and built a factory next door. Standard Oil bought Bly’s barrels, as did other oil, gasoline, and paint companies. The chemical industry, still in its infancy when the first of Bly’s steel drums hit the market, in time would become one of the drum’s biggest users.
Bly’s steel barrels brought in $1 million a year, The New York Times reported in 1911. But her run didn’t last. She lost control of the companies—employee fraud, bankruptcy filing, and disputes dragged on for years in court— just as World War I began and the need for steel drums skyrocketed. World War II only increased demand. By then, a few dozen companies manufactured drums that supplied oil and diesel to war machines. Emptied barrels were repurposed into cook stoves, footings for roughshod buildings, and on Trinidad and Tobago, near the U.S. base there, into magnificent, precisely tuned musical steelpan drums.
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