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Standard Oil was incorporated in 1870. Why wouldn’t there have been gasoline in 1902?

• TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  No gasoline-powered vehicles. Oil and the other products they refined is not gasoline. Perhaps there were other devices needing gasoline at that time, but the existence of gasoline would be so rare that these city women would not have access to it. Wikipedia is rife with nonsense sometimes.
  • jrochkind1 4y ago
    Peer comments suggestion that it would make sense if it were kerosene seems right. There was probably plenty of kerosene around for lamps in nyc in 1905 (although piped natural gas lighting was also common), and kerosene would work fine to turn meat into a burning projectile. Or perhaps to intentionally befoul and ruin the meat for sale, as part of the boycott/protest/riot, with the projectile part being secondary. But yeah, unfortunately the wikipedia source for the burning meat projectile claim is to a web page that makes the same claim without really citing it's source (beyond the name of a historian). We'd have to do some research to see if we could find a cited primary source that this claim came from originally, and how it appeared there. I really like the image regardless. It does not seem implausible to me, generally, with kerosene. But it's an enjoyable image either way.