Until the development of cracking processes, the East Chicago refinery produced twice as much fuel oil as it did gasoline. This lesser product glutted the market, the only outlet being the bunkering of lake vessels and a few railroad engines.

Harry F. Sinclair dramatically created a big new use for such fuels in the Chicago area in 1919. A coal handler's strike closed Chicago's public schools. On the advice of Sheldon Clark, a Sinclair vice president in Chicago, Mr. Sinclair sent a telegram to the Chicago mayor. "The welfare of the school children," he wired, "means more than the welfare of my corporation." He offered to convert all of Chicago's schools to oil heat without charge.

Under an enormous fanfare of national publicity, craftsmen from the East Chicago refinery designed, made and installed, in ten Chicago elementary schools, equipment converting their boilers from coal to oil, all in ten days time. Clark turned the incident into a national demonstration of the superiority of oil heat. At the time, no commercial oil burners were available for industry, institutions or homes. But demand created a new industry. Before the end of the winter of 1919-1920, Sinclair's fuel oil business in the Chicago area required twenty big delivery trucks.

By now Sinclair had begun an assault upon the east coast, extending its marketing into New England by purchase of the Keith Oil Company, which owned service stations, and an ocean terminal at Tiverton, Rhode Island. The Oil City Derrick, a trade publication, commenting on this development, observed, "Probably no other company in all the history of oil has grown as rapidly in all the branches of the business as the Sinclair Oil & Refining Corporation has since it was organized less than two years ago."

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