Word: oils
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...marks the sesquicentennial of the first oil well, which was drilled in Titusville, Pa. It has been more than a century since any major producer shipped oil in an actual barrel, but the unit has been the industry's standard ever since the overwhelmed Pennsylvania oilmen struck their first gusher. Before U.S. drilling began in 1859, "rock oil" (to differentiate it from vegetable oil or animal fat) was sopped up with rags, wrung out and peddled as a cure for everything from headaches to deafness. Spurred by demand for lamp fuel as whale blubber grew scarce, derricks popped...
...oil boom took hold and the barrel size was set at 42 gal. (160 L), Pennsylvania's roads became clogged with horse-drawn wagons piled high with the containers, prompting construction of the first oil pipelines (made of wood) and leading 25-year-old John D. Rockefeller to form what became the Standard Oil Co. It eventually controlled up to 90% of U.S. oil-refining until the company was broken up in 1911. (See pictures showing the history of the Exxon Valdez disaster...
...East Germany's answer to the Volkswagen Beetle, the symbol of West Germany's economic miracle and rise after World War II. But the Trabi was more a mockery. It had a plastic body and was driven by a two-stroke engine that ran on a cocktail of oil and gasoline that emitted a putrid stench as it rolled with a characteristic clackety-clack along East German roads. (Read about the Beetle in TIME's most important cars of all time...
Obama is stuck in the New World's new paradox. Latin America today is less dependent on Washington, and less tolerant of its interventionism, than it has been for decades, thanks to the counterweight of rising star Brazil and the anti-U.S. gospel of Venezuela's oil-rich leftist President, Hugo Chávez. Yet for all that newfound self-reliance, Latin America still looks to the U.S.'s superpower leadership to put the squeeze on rogues like the Honduran coupsters. No other force in the western hemisphere, not Brazil, and certainly not the Organization of American States, wields...
...Still, the Libyans have good reason for wanting to satisfy Western concerns. Ghaddafi badly wants to break out of the U.N. sanctions regime that has been in place since 1992. Modernizing his oil fields depends on access to Western technology currently denied him by sanctions. In fact, the only reason the Libyans handed over the two agents named in the Lockerbie indictment was the prospect of closing the matter and to allow the lifting of U.N. sanctions against Libya. Even then, it took eight years of coaxing by the Saudis and South Africa's then-president Nelson Mandela to persuade...