Increasing sales of gasoline first for automobiles and then for airplanes in the early 1900s came as oil discoveries across the United States mounted. The oil industry had a vast new market for what had been for many years a useless by-product of the distilling process. As soon as the internal combustion engines created demand, refiners sought better methods to produce and improve gasolines.
Before its entry into World War I, the United States contributed oil to the Allies, and in 1917 the oil companies cooperated with the Fuel Administration. At war’s end executives who had served with that agency created the American Petroleum Institute (1919), which in time became a major force in the economy and the business.