Crumb
c/til · by tomatoely@sh.itjust.works · 199d

TIL before 1972 sperm whales were killed in order to make transmission fluids for car transmissions

https://magazine.washington.edu/feature/the-innovation-file-solving-a-whale-of-a-problem/

Also the antifungus cream I'm using has synthetic sperm whale oil in it

280 points · 20 comments · view on lemmy.world

20 Comments

Pacrat173@lemmy.ml · 52 pts · 199d

  • "Gas was an environmental disaster, anyway. Now we use alternative fuels."

  • ―Leela

  • "Like what?"

  • ―Fry

  • "Whale oil."

  • ―Leela

RamRabbit@lemmy.world · 44 pts · 199d (5 replies)

Yeah, whale oil was the base for a large host of high quality oils. It just happens to be real good.

cadekat@pawb.social · 17 pts · 199d (1 reply)

What makes a particular oil so good?

RamRabbit@lemmy.world · 42 pts · 199d

The main use was for lighting as it burns cleanly and brightly. This was eventually replaced by kerosene which performs even better and doesn't leave a fishy odor.

It was also good for machine lubrication; and didn't really have any notable competitors until petroleum-derived lubricants were developed and manufactured en-mass.

cv_octavio@piefed.ca · 15 pts · 199d (1 reply)
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blimthepixie@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 199d

Surprised I had to scroll this far to find this

macaw_dean_settle@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 199d

*really good. Not opposed to fake good.

matsdis@piefed.social · 41 pts · 199d (1 reply)

The same story told from an environmentalist perspective: https://edconway.substack.com/p/no-kerosene-did-not-save-the-sperm

So what really saved the whales? Well, the answer is first, the whaling bans. [...] In the face of this enforced shortage of whale oil, lubricant manufacturers and other users of whale oil had to try to find a satisfactory substitute.

Lo and behold, in the 1970s there was a sharp rise in research and development spending on esters. Chemists worked out how to create synthetic alternatives.

(The posted article has this too, and expands on the business side of it.)

idyllic@leminal.space · 5 pts · 199d

Yup. Thanks for this context.

tyrant@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 199d (6 replies)

What do the whales need this oil for? Is there oil in other animals? Is there human oil?

SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de · 44 pts · 199d (1 reply)

Yes. Baby oil

SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca · 6 pts · 199d

Johandea@feddit.nu · 20 pts · 199d (3 replies)

The function of spermaceti, i.e. the oil like substance in sperm whales, is unknown. But a lot of whale oil was extracted from heating whale blubber from different whale species.

You can absolutely render out an oil of sorts from human adipose tissue. This may happen after we die under certain circumstances and can be found as adipocere, aka corpse wax.

aeration1217@lemmy.org · 14 pts · 199d (2 replies)

and you said corpse wax is great on surfboards?

idyllic@leminal.space · 3 pts · 199d

This made me actually chuckle.

Supervisor194@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 199d
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WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 199d (1 reply)

I'm glad we found an alternative before people started using some sort of CAFO style farming for whale oil. All I can picture is like maple syrup tree taps in the poor animals heads.

acockworkorange@mander.xyz · 3 pts · 198d

According to another comment here, we only truly found alternatives because whaling was getting banned.

crank0271@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 199d (1 reply)

Also the antifungus cream I'm using has synthetic sperm whale oil in it

Ah, the margarine of anti-fungal creams.

prex@aussie.zone · 7 pts · 199d

I can't believe its not antifungal cream

FatVegan@leminal.space · 6 pts · 199d

That's crazy. But also it's 2026 and we torture animals for food.

pedz@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 199d

They're still killing a few billion other animals yearly, just that those are "accidents" instead of being on purpose.

Very large numbers of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates are killed on the world's roads every day. A Humane Society volunteer survey conducted over three Memorial Day weekends in the 1960s estimated that one million vertebrate animals are killed by vehicular traffic daily in the United States. A 2008 Federal Highway Administration report estimates that 1 to 2 million accidents occur each year between large animals and vehicles. Extrapolating globally based on total length of roads, roughly 5.5 million vertebrates are killed per day, or over 2 billion annually.