Whale oil: from the street lamp to margarine, the product that emptied the oceans

It is often said that whaling stopped because petroleum replaced lamp oil. That is true of the nineteenth century. It is false for the twentieth, which was by far the deadliest: close to 2.9 million great whales killed. By then the oil was no longer used for lighting. It was used to make margarine.

What whale oil is

It is rendered from the blubber, the layer of subcutaneous fat that insulates the animal from the cold and serves as its energy store. It is cut into strips and melted down, on shore in cauldrons, then on board factory ships from the 1920s onwards.

Chemically it is a mixture of triglycerides, like a vegetable oil, but liquid at room temperature and strongly odorous. Those two properties long bounded its uses: good for lighting and soap, unfit for food.

The trade, for its part, did not speak of “whale oil” in the singular. It distinguished three products at very different prices, and confusing them distorts any reading of this economy.

• Train oil, rendered from the blubber of baleen whales, sold by the cask. It is the one this page deals with, and by far the largest volume.
• Sperm oil, rendered from the body of the sperm whale, distinct from the spermaceti of its head, and markedly better paid.
• Melon oil, or the jaw oil of dolphins and porpoises, sold by the flask as a precision lubricant, the dearest of the three by the litre.

The century of the lamp

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, whale oil lit the cities of Europe and North America. It fed the street lamps, the lighthouses and the household lamps. It also served as soap, as a lubricant for textile machinery, as a raw material for paints and varnishes, and as leather grease.

This economy declined from 1859, when the drilling of the first commercial oil well in Pennsylvania opened the age of kerosene, cheaper and cleaner. American whaling, that of Nantucket and New Bedford, collapsed. The story might have seemed over.

1906: the chemical reaction that restarted everything

It was a laboratory process that was to reopen the market, and multiply the catches tenfold.

Hydrogenation consists in adding hydrogen to unsaturated fatty acid chains, in the presence of a catalyst, in order to saturate them. A liquid oil becomes a solid fat. The process was developed by the German chemist Wilhelm Normann and industrialised from 1906 onwards.

For whale oil this was a transfiguration. It could now go into hard soap, and above all into margarine, demand for which was booming in Europe. The smell remained. That obstacle fell in 1929, when the chemists of Lever Brothers and of the Margarine Union learned to deodorise whale oil completely while hardening it. The two groups merged the following year to form Unilever.

The result was clear-cut: in 1935, about 84% of world whale oil production went into margarine. Antarctic catches rose from about 2,000 to more than 20,000 whales a year in the first decade of the century alone, and went on climbing afterwards.

Why it was the blue whale that paid

An oil sold by the cask rewards mass. The ideal target is therefore the animal that yields the most blubber per harpoon shot, which explains the order in which the species were destroyed.

The blue whale came first, then the fin whale, then the sei whale, then the common minke whale. With each collapse, the fleet moved down one step in size. The statistics of the International Whaling Commission, set out in detail on our page on whaling from 1900 to 2025, trace exactly this cascade.

These fast rorquals could not be hunted before the explosive harpoon gun of Svend Foyn, patented in Norway in 1864, coupled with steamships and then with factory ships fitted with a stern slipway. The technique and the outlet met at the worst possible moment for the whales.

Everything else the oil did

Margarine and soap were the mass outlets, but the list is longer, and it explains the resilience of the market.

The oil went into varnishes and paints, into linoleum, into the treatment of jute and coarse textiles, into the currying of leather. Treated with sulphur, it yielded high-pressure lubricants able to hold under loads that drove out ordinary oils. It also served as a quenching bath for steel.

And above all it had a military outlet that is systematically forgotten: saponification releases glycerol, the raw material of nitroglycerine. Our page on glycerine and explosives sets out this link, which made whale oil a strategic product during the two world wars.

The end, and what it owes to economics

After the war, tropical vegetable oils, groundnut, palm, copra, then soya, became cheaper and easier to secure than Antarctic expeditions. Margarine did without the whale well before the law obliged it to.

The commercial moratorium of the International Whaling Commission, adopted in 1982 and in force from 1986, therefore arrived on an already moribund market. This is an important nuance: the protection was won partly because the resource was no longer worth much, which also explains why it has remained fragile wherever a market survives.

Forty years on, several of the species exploited for their oil have not recovered their numbers. Our page on conservation status shows which ones.

This page is part of our feature on whale products, which presents the six main uses that drove commercial whaling.