Whale oil

Moby Dick was a work of fiction. But the story that inspired it was not. "In  the Heart of the Sea," the movie directed by Ron Howard which came out last year, tells the true story. A huge white whale turned on the whaling ship that hunted it, and a few sailors managed to live through it.

Nineteenth-century risk-takers paid for ships and for sailors' labor, men risked their lives and spent years at sea - all to pay the price to obtain whale oil. But the price climbed higher when whale populations declined around the world, so it was harder and more expensive to bring that oil home.

There's an economic lesson here. The expense to "harvest" whale oil got too high. At that point investors looked for investment opportunities in alternatives to whale oil. Alternatives like petroleum and electricity turned out to be far better for humanity - and for the whales, whose population recovered.

In the final words of the film, “I hear someone’s found oil by drilling into the ground. Who’d have thought!”