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Whale oil
- Thread starter doghead
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Well, that is technically "whale" oil......
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. BUMP, for those that missed this one. Merry Christmas!
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"Whale oil"
Were the oil rush to have started several decades later than the 1860s, we might have never witnessed a sperm whale in the 20th century – sperm whale oil was the essential source for producing kerosene, and as a result they were almost hunted down to extinction.
Whale oil is oil obtained from the blubber of whales. Whale oil from the bowhead whale was sometimes known as train oil, which comes from the Dutch word traan ("tear" or "drop").
Sperm oil, a special kind of oil obtained from the head cavities of sperm whales, differs chemically from ordinary whale oil: it is composed mostly of liquid wax. Its properties and applications differ from those of regular whale oil, and it is sold for a higher price.
First up, whale oil isn’t necessarily whale oil… some whale oil was much more valuable, ie the sperm whales oil - or rather wax.
See, the sperm whale got its name from the wax-like liquid (spermaceti) in its massive head. It was once believed to be the whales actual love-juice and because of the abundance of this very sperm-like liquid, the whale got its name. This liquid is quite amazing as it helps the whale with buoyancy and sonar. They can regulate the viscosity of the liquid with colder water. As it turns colder and hardens, the volume decreases. It also allows sound to travel eight times faster than through air. That’s important if you want to understand how something looks by sonar. For reference, this speed around double the speed of sound inside a dolphins head. Sperm whales have probably the best sonar of all animals.
So there’s the whale oil you extract from rendering it off the blubber of whales - mainly baleen-whales. They are nice and fat and also slow.
And there’s the wax-like oil from certain toothed whales, especially the sperm whale whos melon could hold almost 2k litres of wax. That didn’t need to be rendered out, you only needed to tap into it and it would run out at room temperature.
The actual applications for whale oil and spermaceti were varied: soap, machine grease and even medicine. Yes, people swallowed the stuff. For the most part, it was used as lamp oil until kerosene eventually replaced it. Burned whale oil apparently smelled awful. It wasn’t very desirable as soap neither, although I think that was the second largest use, because it would discolour the skin yellowish. But I guess personal hygiene wasn’t that big back then, so washing occasionally and looking a bit yellowish was acceptable.
The benefit of whale oil was that it was quite different from other oils that we could obtain easily, ie: olive oil. The viscosity was generally lower than easily obtained vegetable oils.
Whale oil was easy to obtain, although the supply was lower than the demand, hence ‘valuable’. Petro-chemical oils were much harder to refine to the same viscosity and vegetable oils were also not so common as they are today.
Were the oil rush to have started several decades later than the 1860s, we might have never witnessed a sperm whale in the 20th century – sperm whale oil was the essential source for producing kerosene, and as a result they were almost hunted down to extinction.
Whale oil is oil obtained from the blubber of whales. Whale oil from the bowhead whale was sometimes known as train oil, which comes from the Dutch word traan ("tear" or "drop").
Sperm oil, a special kind of oil obtained from the head cavities of sperm whales, differs chemically from ordinary whale oil: it is composed mostly of liquid wax. Its properties and applications differ from those of regular whale oil, and it is sold for a higher price.
First up, whale oil isn’t necessarily whale oil… some whale oil was much more valuable, ie the sperm whales oil - or rather wax.
See, the sperm whale got its name from the wax-like liquid (spermaceti) in its massive head. It was once believed to be the whales actual love-juice and because of the abundance of this very sperm-like liquid, the whale got its name. This liquid is quite amazing as it helps the whale with buoyancy and sonar. They can regulate the viscosity of the liquid with colder water. As it turns colder and hardens, the volume decreases. It also allows sound to travel eight times faster than through air. That’s important if you want to understand how something looks by sonar. For reference, this speed around double the speed of sound inside a dolphins head. Sperm whales have probably the best sonar of all animals.
So there’s the whale oil you extract from rendering it off the blubber of whales - mainly baleen-whales. They are nice and fat and also slow.
And there’s the wax-like oil from certain toothed whales, especially the sperm whale whos melon could hold almost 2k litres of wax. That didn’t need to be rendered out, you only needed to tap into it and it would run out at room temperature.
The actual applications for whale oil and spermaceti were varied: soap, machine grease and even medicine. Yes, people swallowed the stuff. For the most part, it was used as lamp oil until kerosene eventually replaced it. Burned whale oil apparently smelled awful. It wasn’t very desirable as soap neither, although I think that was the second largest use, because it would discolour the skin yellowish. But I guess personal hygiene wasn’t that big back then, so washing occasionally and looking a bit yellowish was acceptable.
The benefit of whale oil was that it was quite different from other oils that we could obtain easily, ie: olive oil. The viscosity was generally lower than easily obtained vegetable oils.
Whale oil was easy to obtain, although the supply was lower than the demand, hence ‘valuable’. Petro-chemical oils were much harder to refine to the same viscosity and vegetable oils were also not so common as they are today.
| Liquid | temperature | Kinematic | Viscosity | |
| F° | C° | cSt | SSU | |
Whale oil | 100 130 | 37.8 54.4 | 35-39.6 19.9-23.4 | 163-184 97-112 |
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A bit more to put it in perspective.
Did I put it in the right place?
Did I put it in the right place?
m715mike
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Reading this thread was a Christmas treat. Thanks @doghead !!
dependable
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That was a while ago, hehe,
Wolfen
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I remember that.