Standard Oil for good or for ill has been the defining force of American industry for over a hundred years. As the world’s largest oil company, Standard Oil has shaped the fates of nations and earn the Rockefellers an imperial crown. Standard Oil’s beginnings were rather inauspicious, its founder John D Rockefeller was a minor grocer who soon noticed the boom bust nature and easy money of the rapidly expanding oil industries of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Realizing that the true money is made through reefing and distribution, he and a group of backers soon monopolized the burgeoning oil refining industry of Cleveland. From there standard oil spread across first the USA and by the 1880’s the CSA. Through vertical organization their business soon came to dominate the drilling, transport, refining