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H-C Gasoline was one of Sinclair's earliest products and was common throughout Midwetern states in the 1920's. In 1896, twenty-year-old Harry Sinclair of Independence, Kansas, lost the family drugstore in a speculation just as an oil boom was beginning in the area, and turned to selling lumber for oil derricks. On the side he bought and sold oil leases, traveling all over southeast Kansas and northeast Indian Territory by train an dbuggy. By 1907 Sinclair's talent for picking successful oil investments made him the richest man in Kansas. In 1916 he borrowed $20 million from New York Bankers to buy up undervalued assests in the Midwest, to build new refineries at Kansas City and Chicago connected by a new pipline, and to combine those enterprises with companies he already controlled. Thus, at age thirty-nine, he established the Sinclair Oil and Refining Corporation, on eof the ten largest American oil companies. With the rapid rise of th eautomobile, the conversion of ships and railroads from coal to fuel oil, and the coming of World War 1, demand surpassed supply and sales soared. In 1926 Sinclair Oil introduced its new high octane gasoline, "Houston Concentrate": H-C. |
