Muckrakers — a term coined in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt — referred to American …
The real service of the Standard has been not this multiplication of so-called products, but in finding processes by which a poor oil like the famous Lima oil could be refined. In the case of the Lima oil the Standard claims it spent millions of dollars before it solved the problem of a its usefulness. The amount of sulfur in the Lima or Ohio oil prevented its use as an illuminating oil, for the odor was intolerable, there was a disagreeable smoke, and the wick charred rapidly. The problem of deodorizing it was attacked by many experimenters, and was finally practically solved by the Frasch process, which the Standard acquired after spending a large amount of money in testing its efficacy. Probably sixty percent of the illuminating oil used in the United States is now manufactured from an Ohio oil base.
— The History of the Standard Oil Company by Ida Minerva Tarbell
I read this whole damn book so I could learn something about the oil industry in in my hometown (Lima, Ohio) and it finally crops up in the last 20 pages only to be called bad and stinky. (Everyone knows sulfur is in the area—the whole area smells of it, a remnant from the Great Black Swamp that was drained only a few decades before oil production started. Great Black Swamp also gave Lima its name, from when they received malaria medication from Lima, Peru!).