Business: Meyer v. Deterding

Directors of the Standard Oil Co. of N. Y., by electing Charles F. Meyer (one of their number) president last week,* emphasized a unique commercial parallelism.

Standard's great rival in the international oil markets is the Royal Dutch-Shell group, which Sir Henri Wilhelm August Deterding heads.

Both Meyer and Deterding are in their middle sixties. Meyer's ancestors were Germans. Deterding's father was a Dutch sea captain.

Both men, before they became great in the world's oil industry, kept business accounts. Meyer at 22 (in 1886) found work as bookkeeper in the old Standard Oil's Boston office. Soon he became statistician. Deterding at 22 quit work as Chief Clerk in an Amsterdam bank to adventure in the Dutch East Indies, where he sold among a multitude of general items kerosene lamps. The East Indians who used those lamps filled them with Standard oil shipped in square cans from the U. S. Sumatra, Batavia, Borneo, Java and the rest of the archipelago were not yet producing the oil that later the Royal Dutch-Shell was to control. First oil of the region was discovered at Sumatra in the late 1880's; the Royal Dutch Co. (the Dutch royal family are important stockholders) was incorporated at The Hague only in 1890.

In 1892, Deterding became a Royal Dutch employe, at their Batavia headquarters.

In 1893, Standard Oil sent Meyer to manage their Bombay office.

In 1896, Deterding became general sales manager in the Far East for Royal Dutch.

Mr. Meyer went to Manhattan to be a member of Standard Oil's foreign trade committee in 1907, to be vice president and director in 1920. But already, at the beginning of this century, Sir Henri had moved to his Royal Dutch headquarters in The Hague, and from there he directed the fight for customers.

Worth struggling for has been the field — China with 400,000,000 people, East Indies with 50,000,000, India with 318,000,000. Everywhere Standard Oil was first. In China, to get natives to buy kerosene, Standard salesmen sold lamps for less than a song, for a cheep as inebriates of Singapore used to say. Mei Fooy is the Chinese name for Standard Oil. Shouting Mei Fooy out loudly once saved the life of Lucy Aldrich, John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s sister-in-law, when in 1923 Chinese bandits captured her. It was the only phrase she knew; and the bandits, if they knew not its potency, knew its beneficence. They quickly released her.

In India Sir Henri has used gang tactics for abusing Standard Oil. His English Shell Transport relations have brought him British government aid. Indian duties against Standard oil are higher than against Royal Dutch-Shell oil.

In the East Indies the tactics have been almost the same.