In 1883, an old wish is granted – the railway line connecting Baku to the Caspian Sea at the port of Batum on the Black Sea is complete. This makes it easier to transport Branobel's products to Europe. At the same time, the rich French banking family, the Rothschilds, get involved in the stakes for Baku's oil and competition increases.
When Robert Nobel realised the possibilities of oil extraction in Baku on the Caspian Sea, oil management was very primitive. The oil was scooped out of the wells by hand and transported in wooden barrels on carts pulled by donkeys. The Nobel brothers started to build pumps, pipelines, depots and railway tracks. Ludvig Nobel himself constructed the world's first modern tanker. The effect of this was a total industrial transformation of the oil industry.
When Robert Nobel realised the possibilities of oil extraction in Baku on the Caspian Sea, oil management was very primitive. The oil was scooped out of the wells by hand and transported in wooden barrels on carts pulled by donkeys. So, in 1879, Robert Nobel sends his colleague, Törnqvist, to the USA to obtain information about modern pipelaying at his competitor, Rockefeller's, plants in Pennsylvania.
The transport of oil on the waterways from Baku to the market in Europe required fresh ideas. With his experiences of building tankers for the Russian navy, Ludvig Nobel became the first person to design and order a tanker built of steel. In 1877, an order was placed at Motala works' shipyards in Norrköping. The vessel was named Zoroaster, after the Iranian philosopher, Zarathustra, whose theses were very popular among Europeans of the time.
It is one thing to bring oil to the surface, and quite another to transport it to customers. Around 1880, the Branobel company had to create its own transport system from Baku on the southern border of the Russian Empire. The town of Tsaritsyn, later renamed Stalingrad, became an important hub in the distribution network.
In the 1880s, Branobel’s business in the Baku oil trade grew quickly, and Ludvig Nobel assumed various responsibilities in bodies organising many companies in the Baku petrochemical industry. The production figures of Branobel rocketed.
The Nobel family played an important role in the development of Azerbaijan’s oil industry from the late 19th century and onwards. The first member of the family to get acquainted with Baku was Robert Nobel, who went to Azerbaijan in 1873. The gun business brought him there.
Branobel was founded in 1879 and grew quickly due to the Nobel brothers’ willingness to develop all parts of the oil business like production, transportation and sale. At the end of the 19th century Branobel was among the eight biggest oil companies in the world.
In 1876, a new phase begins in the history of the Nobel engineering works once Ludvig and his eldest son, Emanuel, had visited their brother Robert Nobel in Baku. After this, a lot of the manufacturing in the engineering works in St Petersburg is adapted to the great need for development of the Nobels' oil industry in Baku.
In the middle of the 1880s, the battle for power over the world's oil markets between first and foremost, Branobel, the American Standard Oil and the French family the Rothschilds' company, BNITO, gets tougher. Agreements and treachery, bribes, industrial espionage, price wars, gossip and slander – every means available was used in the war over the oil market.
