TIL before 1972 sperm whales were killed in order to make transmission fluids for car transmissions
22d 3h ago by sh.itjust.works/u/tomatoely in til from magazine.washington.edu
Also the antifungus cream I'm using has synthetic sperm whale oil in it
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"Gas was an environmental disaster, anyway. Now we use alternative fuels."
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―Leela
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"Like what?"
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―Fry
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"Whale oil."
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―Leela
Yeah, whale oil was the base for a large host of high quality oils. It just happens to be real good.
What makes a particular oil so good?
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.
Surprised I had to scroll this far to find this
*really good. Not opposed to fake good.
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.)
Yup. Thanks for this context.
What do the whales need this oil for? Is there oil in other animals? Is there human oil?
Yes. Baby oil
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.
and you said corpse wax is great on surfboards?
This made me actually chuckle.
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.
According to another comment here, we only truly found alternatives because whaling was getting banned.
Also the antifungus cream I'm using has synthetic sperm whale oil in it
Ah, the margarine of anti-fungal creams.
I can't believe its not antifungal cream
That's crazy. But also it's 2026 and we torture animals for food.
They're still killing a few billion other animals yearly, just that those are "accidents" instead of being on purpose.