History of The Oil Tanker - Nobel Brothers

Nobel Brothers

In 1876, Ludvig and Robert Nobel, brothers of Alfred Nobel, founded Branobel (short for Brothers Nobel) in Baku, Azerbaijan. It was, during the late 19th century, one of the largest oil companies in the world.

Ludvig was a pioneer in the development of early oil tankers. He first experimented with carrying oil in bulk on single-hulled barges. Turning his attention to self-propelled tankships, he faced a number of challenges. A primary concern was to keep the cargo and fumes well away from the engine room to avoid fires. Other challenges included allowing for the cargo to expand and contract due to temperature changes, and providing a method to ventilate the tanks.

Even Tollefsen of Norway constructed the world's first successful oil tanker "Lindesnæs" in Tønsberg, Norway, in 1877. A little later, in 1878, Nobel's Zoroaster was built. He designed this ship in Gothenburg, Sweden, with Sven Almqvist. The contract to build it was signed in January 1878, and it made its first run later that year from Baku to Astrakhan. The Zoroaster design was widely studied and copied, with Nobel refusing to patent any part of it. In October 1878 he ordered two more tankers of the same design: the Buddha and the Nordenskjöld.

Zoraster carried its 242 long tons of kerosene cargo in two iron tanks joined by pipes. One tank was forward of the midships engine room and the other was aft. The ship also featured a set of 21 vertical watertight compartments for extra buoyancy. The ship had a length overall of 184 feet (56 m), a beam of 27 feet (8.2 m), and a draft of 9 feet (2.7 m). Unlike later Nobel tankers, the Zoraster design was built small enough to sail from Sweden to the Caspian by way of the Baltic Sea, Lake Ladoga, Lake Onega, the Rybinsk and Mariinsk Canals and the Volga River.

When W.A. Riedmann of Geestemünde entered the petroleum trade in 1877, he noted the difficulties of using barrels, and began to experiment with the former emigrant ships Adona and Derby, filling their large iron drinking water tanks with oil. In October 1879 he purchased the Andromeda at Liverpool, an 1876 ton full-rigged composite ship built in 1864, brought it to Teklenborgs Werft, and added seventy iron tanks to the hold. The piping between the tanks was connected so that all could be filled from a single tank. The composite hull, with structural members of iron covered with wooden planking, was especially suitable for the addition of tanks, because they could be firmly fastened to the iron beams. Andromeda made seven trips from Germany to North America as a sailing oil tanker.

Nobel then began to adopt a single-hull design, where the ship's hull forms part of its tank structure. In November 1880 he ordered his first single-hulled tanker, the Moses. Within a year, he ordered seven more single-hulled tankers: the Mohammed, Tatarin, Bramah, Spinoza, Socrates, Darwin, Koran, Talmud, and Calmuck.

Branobel experienced one of the first oil tanker disasters. In 1881 Zoroaster's sister-ship, Nordenskjöld, exploded in Baku while taking on kerosene. The pipe carrying the cargo was jerked away from the hold when the ship was hit by a gust of wind. Kerosene then spilled onto the deck and down into the engine room, where mechanics were working in the light of kerosene lanterns. The ship then exploded, killing half the crew. Nobel responded to the disaster by creating a flexible, leakproof loading pipe which was much more resistant to spills.

In 1883, oil tanker design took a large step forward. Working for the Nobel company, Colonel Henry F. Swan designed a set of three Nobel tankers. Instead of one or two large holds, Swan's design used several holds which spanned the width, or beam, of the ship. These holds were further subdivided into port and starboard sections by a longitudinal bulkhead. Earlier designs suffered from stability problems caused by the free surface effect, where oil sloshing from side to side could cause a ship to capsize. But this approach of dividing the ship's storage space into smaller tanks virtually eliminated free-surface problems. This approach, almost universal today, was first used by Swan in the Nobel tankers Blesk, Lumen, and Lux.

In 1903, the Nobel brothers built two oil tankers which ran on internal combustion engines, as opposed to the older steam engines. The Vandal, the first diesel-electric ship, was capable of carrying 750 long tons of refined oil was powered by three 120 horsepower (89 kW) diesel motors. The larger Sarmat employed four 180 h.p. engines. The first seagoing diesel-powered tanker, 4,500 ton Mysl, was built by Nobel's competitors in Kolomna. Nobel responded with Emanuel Nobel and Karl Hagelin, 4,600 long ton kerosene tankers with 1,200 horsepower (890 kW) engines.

The 475 ft., 7-masted schooner Thomas W. Lawson, built in 1902, was the largest purely sail tanker ever built. It carried coal, and oil in barrels from Texas to the East Coast of the U.S. This 5,218 GRT schooner was fitted out as an oil tanker in 1906, and sunk in a storm off Isles of Scilly in Dec. 1907.

The Glückauf represented a large step forward in tanker design. Another design of Colonel Swan, the ship has been called the "true progenitor of all subsequent tanker tonnage." Its features included cargo valves operable from the deck, cargo main piping, a vapor line, cofferdams for added safety, and the ability to load seawater ballast when empty of cargo. Wilhelm Anton Riedemann, an agent for the Standard Oil Company purchased Glückauf and several of her sister ships. After the Glückauf was lost in 1893, Standard Oil purchased the sister ships. Riedemann's sailing fleet, which consisted of 5 petroleum clippers, including the Maria Anna, and 6 other ships, was dissolved in 1889.