Royal Dutch Shell - History - 20th Century

20th Century

The Royal Dutch Shell Group was created in February 1907 through the merger of two rival companies - Royal Dutch Petroleum Company (Dutch legal name : N.V. Koninklijke Nederlandsche Petroleum Maatschappij) and the "Shell" Transport and Trading Company Ltd of the United Kingdom, founded by Marcus Samuel, 1st Viscount Bearsted. It was a move largely driven by the need to compete globally with the then dominant American petroleum company, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, and as a strategy to face the challenges brought by the crisis of 1907. The terms of the merger gave 60% ownership of the new Group to the Dutch arm and 40% to the British.

Royal Dutch Petroleum Company was a Dutch company founded in 1890 by Jean Baptiste August Kessler, along with Henri Deterding, when a Royal charter was granted by King William III of the Netherlands to a small oil exploration and production company known as "Royal Dutch Company for the Working of Petroleum Wells in the Dutch East Indies".

The "Shell" Transport and Trading Company (the quotation marks were part of the legal name) was a British company, founded in 1897 by Marcus Samuel and his brother Samuel Samuel. Their father had owned a company, importing and selling sea-shells, after which the company "Shell" took its name. Initially the Company commissioned eight oil tankers for the purposes of transporting oil. In 1919, Shell took control of the Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company and in 1921 formed Shell-Mex Limited which marketed products under the "Shell" and "Eagle" brands in the United Kingdom. In 1932, partly in response to the difficult economic conditions of the times, Shell-Mex merged its UK marketing operations with those of British Petroleum to create Shell-Mex and BP Ltd, a company that traded until the brands separated in 1975.

Around 1952, Shell was the first company to purchase and use an electronic computer in the Netherlands. The computer, a Ferranti Mark 1*, was assembled and used at the Shell laboratory in Amsterdam. In 1970 Shell acquired the mining company Billiton, which it subsequently sold in 1994 and now forms part of BHP Billiton.