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Yesterday…

A look through Imperial
Oil’s archives brings the company’s
rich history to life

by Wynne Thomas

HISTORY CAN BE a captivating subject. This I learned when I was about 10 and a schoolboy in Wales. My history mistress had done her best to teach me about the Roman invasion of Britain, but I was much too interested in the Second World War, then going on around us, to be concerned with how we’d made out fighting the Romans 2,000 years earlier. Then, one summer evening, digging in our garden, my father came upon a handful of Roman coins. (The land on which our house was built was near the site of what had been a major Roman encampment – an outpost, in fact, of the crack 20th Legion.) And suddenly, through the medium of those ancient coins, which had lain undiscovered for nearly two millenniums, those Roman centurions who had walked on the very ground on which I now stood became "real" people in my mind for the first time. Thus, for me, began a fascination with Roman history that has continued to this very day.

Artefacts will do that for you every time. As opposed to the "virtual reality" that is becoming an ever-increasing part of our computer-dominated lives, they represent reality itself – solid objects that, having survived the passage of years, allow us a first-hand glimpse, more vivid than mere words can describe, of events that shaped our past.

These reflections were prompted recently by a visit to Imperial Oil’s corporate archives, which are located in a suite of basement rooms at the company’s Toronto headquarters. I was there on a research project that involved digging into a few of the hundreds of boxes of company records stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves, and found myself sidetracked by the nostalgic array of objects – photographs, old documents, long-forgotten products (Ioco liquid gloss, guaranteed to restore the original lustre to your piano), ancient hand-operated motor-oil pumps – that are on view. By historical standards, Imperial isn’t all that old, but it’s still a respectable 120 years, and a lot of things have changed in Canada during that time.

Fashion, for one. Can these bewhiskered, frock-coated gentlemen staring at me from the faded photograph on the wall really be the same men who gambled so much to launch a new enterprise? They certainly don’t match today’s image of the high-flying business entrepreneur, looking more like accountants than risk-takers, more accustomed to counting money than making it. But appearances are deceptive. These are some of the 16 businessmen who in 1880 scraped together $25,000 to form Imperial, figuring that there was money to be made in producing and refining crude oil and selling its products throughout Canada. (In a nearby cabinet are the company’s original letters patent, dated September 8, 1880.)

The gamble paid off and business boomed. By 1893, Imperial was selling lamp oil, candles, axle grease and wax from one end of the country to the other. In fact, business got to be so good that demand for oil began to exceed supply, and Imperial clearly needed to expand. So its founders started looking around for more money – what today we would call venture capital. They couldn’t find any in Canada, but the Standard Oil group south of the border liked the look of the company and was happy to come up with the cash in return for a majority share of the greatly expanded enterprise. (Standard Oil subsequently became Exxon Corporation, now Exxon Mobil Corporation, which today owns nearly 70 percent of Imperial.)

And there, on a nearby table, sits a salesman’s leather portfolio, illustrating a selection of candles from the company’s own candle factory adjacent to its headquarters in Petrolia, Ont. Not far away is an array of Imperial’s mainstay products of those early days: floor waxes; a can of Eureka harness oil; another of Boston coach axle oil ("for oiling buggies, carriages, wagons and trucks"); and – one of Imperial’s best-selling turn-of-the-century products – a container of Mica axle grease, whose splendid friction-reducing qualities, according to an advertisement of the time, were bound to win the gratitude of horse and man alike.

Those were the days, of course, when horses were expected to work for their living by pulling carriages, wagons and ploughs. The horseless carriage was yet to appear on the scene, but when it did, it arrived (often quite literally) with a bang. In 1903 there were 178 automobiles in the whole of Canada. By 1910 there were nearly 6,000, and the demand for what had up to then been a minor by-product of the refining process used mainly for cleaning ladies’ gloves – gasoline – had skyrocketed.

The way in which you acquired gasoline for your car in those pioneer days was as simple as it was dangerous. You took a container down to your local grocery or hardware store and had it filled up. Then you poured it into your gas tank. One day in 1907, Imperial’s Vancouver manager, Charles Rolston, figured that there had to be a better and a safer way to fill motor vehicle gas tanks, and here in the archives is a photograph of the solution he dreamed up. Today we call it a service station. Sure, it was a somewhat makeshift affair – a garden hose dispensed gasoline from a converted hot-water tank – but it was a heck of an advance on carrying it home in a bucket. Imperial’s Vancouver service station was the first in Canada – and, quite possibly, in North America. The idea was quick to catch on – by 1924 there were 295 Imperial service stations, stretching from Vancouver to Halifax.

The burgeoning demand for gasoline, not only for automobiles but also for that other newfangled device, the farm tractor ("A gallon of gasoline can do as much work in an hour as a horse can do in a day," an article in the Imperial Oil Review claimed in 1917), put pressure on Imperial to increase its refining capacity, but the task of finding enough crude oil to feed its refineries was to prove an even tougher challenge. Supplies of oil from southern Ontario, which had been adequate to meet demand before the automobile appeared on the scene, were fast running out, and although a pipeline linking Canada with the midcontinental oilfields of the United States helped to alleviate the shortage, more supplies were urgently needed. In 1914, some oil was found in Turner Valley, near Calgary, but it wasn’t enough, and Imperial started to look overseas.

That explains the two black leather briefcases that lie on a shelf in one corner. In stamped gold lettering, one declares its owner to be T.A. Link. The other, also belonging to Link, is covered with some of those lovely old stickers that were once the hallmark of exotic foreign travel ("Hotel Metropolitano, Ecuador," reads one label; "Canadian Pacific Air Lines," another).

Ted Link was one of the most successful oil hunters in the business. He joined Imperial in 1919 as a geologist – at a time when Canada was importing four-fifths of the crude oil it needed – and ended up as the company’s chief geologist. He had applied to Imperial for a job in South America, but his first assignment was in a considerably colder climate – that of the Northwest Territories, where he was sent to search for oil. And, at Fort Norman (now Norman Wells), just south of the Arctic Circle, he found lots of it. Link’s diaries for 1919 and 1920, which describe exactly how he went about looking for oil on a day-to-day basis, are among the most interesting documents in the archives. Today, Norman Wells is still a significant source of oil for Imperial, producing about 30,000 barrels a day. Later, Link had his wish granted and went to South America. There he spent more than three years with an Imperial subsidiary, the Tropical Oil Company. It was during this time that he emerged not only as an exceptionally gifted field geologist but also as a geology scholar, writing widely for professional journals. Returning to North America in 1926, he earned a doctorate in structural geology from the University of Chicago before rejoining Imperial.

For the 25 years or so following the discovery of oil at Norman Wells, Canada’s oil explorationists were to endure a long dry spell, but the drought ended with a vengeance when Imperial made its great discovery at Leduc just south of Edmonton in 1947. And, once again, Link was at the forefront of the action. As the company’s chief geologist, he played a major role in deciding where to drill Imperial’s famous "last chance" well.

Imperial’s Leduc discovery was to change the course of the Canadian oil industry. It marked Canada’s emergence as a major oil-producing nation and, with the string of other major oil discoveries it triggered in quick succession, revolutionized Alberta’s economy. These discoveries alone added about seven billion barrels to Western Canada’s oil reserves between 1947 and 1957. Clearly, Canada was going to enjoy plentiful supplies of its own crude oil for many years to come.

And that was just as well, for Canadians’ postwar love affair with the automobile was in full swing. Vehicle registrations went from less than a million and a half cars in 1945 to more than five million in 1960. Those were the carefree decades of happy motoring, and the advertisements of the time on view in Imperial’s archives attest to the fact. Open convertibles of almost unimaginable size and power wafted happy families down sunlit and empty highways, tigers lurked in every tankful of Imperial gasoline, and savvy motorists knew that they could "always look to Imperial for the best."

No wonder that face peering down from the picture on one of the walls looks so familiar: it’s Mr. Happy Motoring himself, actor Murray Westgate, whose first appearance as your neighbourhood Esso dealer came in 1952, when Imperial-sponsored Hockey Night in Canada made its television debut after running on radio since 1936. (Westgate’s Quebec counterpart, Philippe Robert, became equally well known in that province.) And no reference to Hockey Night in Canada, the event that dominated Imperial’s advertising activities for so many years, can be complete without a mention of Foster Hewitt, whose reedy tenor voice provided the radio play-by-play reports for many of those years.

By the late 1960s, however, the euphoria of the early postwar years was beginning to wear off, and a more cost-conscious motorist, growing tired of promotions and giveaways, was looking for ways to offset higher gasoline prices (the inevitable result of more expensive crude oil). Imperial responded by opening its first self-serve stations in 1970. Judging from their photographs in the archives, they were pretty modest affairs compared with today’s versions, which feature self-serve and full-serve lanes, car washes, Tigermarket and Tiger Express minisupermarkets and other one-stop shopping conveniences, but they proved to be an instant success with the consumer.

And as the service stations themselves underwent steady change, so did the products they sold – as the variety of gas-pump globes and advertising signage tucked away in various corners of the archives illustrates. Like its competitors, Imperial has never felt the urge for undue modesty when it comes to extolling the virtues of its products. Its first major brand, Premier gasoline, introduced during the First World War, was described as "absolutely the best and most reliable gasoline you can find." Imperial Ethyl gasoline made its appearance in the 1920s, followed, amid a flurry of advertising claims, by 3 Star and Esso Ethyl in the 1930s and Esso and Esso Extra gasolines in the 1940s.

In 1970, the company introduced its first low-lead gasoline and eight years later became the first Canadian oil company to introduce unleaded gasoline. By mid-1990 the company had phased out leaded gasoline altogether.

Beyond question, Imperial’s toughest refining challenges, formulating gasolines that meet the exacting demands of today’s high-technology engine, have come in recent years. Lubricating products, too, have undergone similar improvements.

As Imperial’s products have been modified over the years, so has its approach to marketing, and it’s interesting to spend some time digging in the archives to see how the company’s slogans have kept pace with the changing times. During the 1920s and 1930s, Imperial was "everywhere in Canada" – a claim that no competitor could make in those early days. By the 1940s, with competition heating up, motorists were adjured to "buy at the Imperial sign," and the 1950s saw the introduction of the strong and confident "Always look to Imperial for the best." However, this was eclipsed during the 1960s with the most popular slogan of all: the invitation to Canadians to "put a tiger in your tank." (In the past few years, the tiger has made a strong comeback not only in Canada but also throughout the Esso world.) During the 1970s motorists were encouraged to "explore Canada with Esso," which was succeeded in the 1980s by "You make us better." Most recently, "You’re on your way with Esso" was introduced.

Whether it has to do with finding the crude oil from which to refine gasoline and other products or with the manufacture and sale of those products, every aspect of the company’s activities is represented in one way or another in its archives. For example, hanging on the walls are a number of plaques and awards recognizing Imperial’s long history of support for the arts. Here on a wall is a citation that goes all the way back to 1948, when The Loon’s Necklace, a short film sponsored by Imperial, was chosen as Canada’s best film at the Canadian Film Awards. The following year it won the silver medal at the Venice Film Festival and went on to garner a dozen other prizes throughout Europe and North America. The Newcomers, a series of films about the Canadian experience produced by the company to mark its centenary in 1980, collected another score of Canadian and international prizes.

Comprehensive though they are as a repository of Imperial’s history, the archives remain, by definition, a work in progress. At the turn of the millennium, one cannot but wonder what this place will look like in another 50 years’ time, what new artefacts will have joined the current collection to reflect, for future researchers, the changing face of Canada’s oldest oil company.

Stay tuned.

Photography by Michael Kohn

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