Blue whale skeleton at New Bedford museum still oozing oil

I recall hearing how the demand for whale oil fell off a cliff not long after electricity was scaled for lighting.

Interesting in that now we're looking to move away from hydrocarbons which ultimately was how much of the electricity has been produced.

Crude oil saved the whales from extinction.

Kerosene, refined from crude oil, was at least as good as whale oil for lamps. It was also cheaper, so that was the end of the whaling industry. There were pathetic advertisements from the whale oil people of that time arguing for 'pure' whale oil over 'impure' substitutes. However kerosene was so obviously a better deal consumers switched with lightning speed anyway.

As an aside, gasoline was a waste product of the crude oil refining process that produced kerosene. That meant very cheap fuel for the internal combustion engine which was starting its climb up the technology s-curve at the same time.

- "There were pathetic advertisements from the whale oil people of that time arguing for 'pure' whale oil over 'impure' substitutes."

It's the same today: people pay premiums for vegetables fertilized with "pure" bird poop (guano) over equivalent phosphate rocks mined from the earth.

e.g.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/world/americas/30peru.htm...

Nonetheless whale oil remained very useful as a low temperature machine lubricating oil, and its use for that purpose increased so much that by the 1960s sperm whale catches were at their all-time highest, before abruptly falling with the rise of the environmental movement.

It wasn’t quite immediate - margarine was invented to fill the gap on the demand side, and kept the industry going for quite a few decades.

What killed off whaling was that they killed off the whales - it simply wasn’t economically viable to send ships out any more.