1850 American Gold Baron

Chapter 339 Bustling Los Angeles

Lionel and James did not have too much doubt about Liang Yao's bold words.

What they are visiting now is not a factory that produces kerosene, but a city that produces kerosene, a city that uses the entire city's efforts to produce kerosene.

This street full of kerosene stores is not so much a kerosene store street as it is the kerosene wholesale district of Los Angeles.

After crossing this street, everyone arrived in downtown Los Angeles.

This is the place with the largest flow of people in the entire Los Angeles, and it is also the place with the most various shops.

Almost every store has a very considerable amount of traffic, but the store with the most traffic is undoubtedly the General Machinery Company store.

"Why are there so many customers in these machine shops? They seem to specialize in selling steam engines?" James asked, pointing to the machine shop lined up across the street.

Advertisements for steam engines were placed at the entrances of these machinery stores, telling James that this store was a store specializing in selling steam engines.

"Crude oil is buried tens of meters or even hundreds of meters underground. If you want to extract the crude oil from the ground, you need to use a steam engine to drive a water pump to pump the crude oil up." Liang Yao explained.

The development of the chemical industry in Los Angeles also made steam engine manufacturers in San Francisco and Sacramento very profitable.

In November last year, all types of steam engines in stock at General Machinery Company were sold out.

Not only the steam engines produced by General Machinery, but also the steam engines produced by other steam engine manufacturers are all sold out.

The entire California steam engine market is currently in a state of short supply.

What is dramatic is that some steam engine manufacturers that were on the verge of bankruptcy were revived by huge orders from the Los Angeles Petroleum Company.

After all, the first thing many oil producers in Los Angeles have to solve now is whether they have a steam engine, not the quality of the steam engine.

People will buy the high-quality steam engines produced by General Machinery Company, and there is no need to worry about selling the steam engines produced by unknown small workshops.

Some people even took a fancy to the business opportunities and went to the eastern United States to buy steam engines, and then shipped them to Los Angeles for sale.

"To be precise, these people came to order steam engines." Deng Wenshun added, "There are no ready-made steam engines available in California now."

James nodded with enlightenment and could consume all the steam engines in the entire state. It seems that the oil industry in Los Angeles is indeed developing very well.

"That's a bank?" Lionel guessed, pointing to the Bank of America located next to the square.

"If my guess is correct, this is a local bank providing loan services to local people."

The queue in front of the Bank of America was even more exaggerated, almost circling the entire square.

There were also many people waiting to handle business at the Boston Bank next to the Bank of America, and the long queue at the door even circled half a circle around the square.

"It's true." Liang Yao explained, "This is my bank, and it is also the largest bank in California. Many immigrants who come to Los Angeles are penniless, but oil exploration requires a start-up capital. As you can see, not only food, clothing, housing and transportation

Money is needed, money is needed to buy steam engines, and of course, money is needed to buy land.”

The petrochemical industry in Los Angeles has also driven other local industries in California, among which the banking and machinery industries in California have benefited the most.

This is also a phenomenon that Liang Yao is happy to see.

Unlike San Francisco and Sacramento, which got rich directly through gold mining, Los Angeles got rich through industrial value creation.

As for whether these immigration loans with nothing can be recovered in the future, Liang Yao's attitude is relatively optimistic.

He believes that based on the current development trend of California's chemical industry, most of the money loaned out can be recovered with interest.

"Land in Los Angeles also costs money?" August is the person who knows the United States best among this group of people. Land in Los Angeles requires money to buy, which surprised him very much.

"Most of the land in the western United States is not unclaimed land. Whoever develops it owns it?"

"Yes, before I came to Los Angeles in 1851, most of the land here was indeed ownerless land." Liang Yao said calmly, "But now, most of the land in Los Angeles belongs to me.

"

Unlike the land purchase in Sacramento and Manhattan, New York, Liang Yaohua bought the land in Sacramento and Manhattan with real money.

As for the Los Angeles land, it was Liang Yao who directly entered the horse racing circle at almost no cost. It was a business with no capital and huge profits.

1851.

Lionel and others were greatly surprised by this. Could it be that this kid has the ability to predict the future? He fell in love with the land here two years ago.

Lionel had not paid much attention to this land in the New World before. In fact, the entire Rothschild family was not optimistic about the prospects of the New World, and their investment efforts were limited.

I didn’t expect that in this new world, there is a place like California that is full of gold.

It seems that their family needs to make a new assessment of the business prospects of the American continent, especially the North American continent.

"It's such a vibrant place, full of business opportunities, that I now want to open a branch in California." Lionel sighed.

Deng Wenshun took Lionel, James and others to a relatively neat and uniform oil well, which was obviously a planned oil mining area.

Deng Wenshun pointed to the oil production area in front of him and introduced to everyone: "Gentlemen, this is an oil production area directly under our Standard Oil Group. It is also the most productive oil production area in Los Angeles, with a total of 370 oil wells."

Liang Yao did not incorporate the oil industry into the Americas Group, but directly established a new group company.

With the vast business prospects and huge profits of the petrochemical industry, it has every opportunity to grow independently into a behemoth.

In the future, it is not surprising that Standard Oil's capital scale will exceed that of American Group Liang Yao. Rockefeller, the richest man in American history, relied on the petrochemical industry to monopolize more than 80% of the kerosene supply in North America, allowing thousands of households in the United States to

The dollars of ordinary families flowed into his pocket.

Lionel and others looked at the dark viscous liquid extracted from the ground with curiosity. They not only exclaimed: "Transparent kerosene is extracted from these dark liquids? How did you find out?"

of?"

"This is a trade secret. I can only tell you that there are very good chemists in California. They are good at creating and turning waste into treasure." Liang Yao said, pretending to be enigmatic.

Lionel knew that this was Liang Yao's trade secret. Liang Yao would definitely not tell him how to extract kerosene from crude oil, so he stopped asking in detail.

"How much crude oil can such a well produce per day?" James asked about the crude oil production.

"I want the oil workers to help me answer this question more convincingly." As he said that, Liang Yao asked the oil workers who were working next to the water pump.

These oil workers are immigrants who have just arrived in Los Angeles, and their English is very poor. Since Los Angeles is a city dominated by Chinese, the demand for English is not very high.

Therefore, even if they are the same old immigrants in 1850, the English proficiency of the old Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles is worse than that of the old Chinese immigrants in San Francisco and Sacramento.

For Chinese immigrants in San Francisco or Sacramento, if they don’t know English, it will have some impact on their lives. However, for Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, language issues have never been an issue.

On the contrary, white immigrants in Los Angeles are more troubled by the language problem, because the kerosene dealers in Los Angeles are basically Chinese businessmen. If they want to buy kerosene from Chinese businessmen, they must learn Chinese or related dialects.

After all, like Guangzhou Hongshang, there are only a few Chinese businessmen who know English when they are in China.

These oil workers talked and gestured for a long time before James and others understood that the average daily output of an oil well here is 40 to 50 barrels.

James looked at the barrels containing oil. The capacity of each barrel was clearly marked on the barrels, which was 150 liters.

In other words, each oil well here can produce about six to seven tons of crude oil every day.

(End of chapter)