Chapter 356: Bustling Los Angeles

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

What they are visiting now is not a kerosene factory, but a city that produces kerosene, a city that produces kerosene with all its strength.

This street full of kerosene stores is more like the kerosene wholesale area of ​​Los Angeles than a kerosene store street.

After crossing this street, everyone came to the city center of Los Angeles.

This is the place with the largest flow of people in the whole Los Angeles, and it is also the place with the most stores of all kinds.

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

"Why are there so many customers in these machinery stores? They seem to specialize in selling steam engines?" James pointed to the machinery stores that lined up across the street and asked.

The steam engine advertisements placed at the door of these machinery stores told James that this store is a store that specializes in selling steam engines.

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

The development of Los Angeles' chemical industry has also made steam engine manufacturers in San Francisco and Sacramento rich.

Last November, all types of steam engines in General Machinery's inventory 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 supply and demand.

Dramatically, some steam engine manufacturers that were on the verge of bankruptcy have also been revived due to the huge orders from Los Angeles Oil Company.

After all, many Los Angeles oil producers now have to solve the problem of whether there are steam engines, not the quality of steam engines.

The high-quality steam engines produced by General Machinery have people to buy, and the steam engines produced by unknown small workshops do not have to worry about sales.

Some people even saw the business opportunity 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 are here to reserve steam engines," Deng Wenshun added, "You can't buy ready-made steam engines in California now."

James nodded with understanding. It seems that the oil industry in Los Angeles is indeed developing very well, as it can consume all the steam engines in the entire state.

"Is that a bank?" Leonard guessed, pointing to the Bank of America next to the square.

"If I guess correctly, 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 also circled half of the square.

"Indeed." 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 mining requires a start-up capital. As you can see, not only food, clothing, housing and transportation require money, but also buying steam engines requires money, and of course, buying land also requires money."

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 immigrants who have nothing can get their loans back in the future, Liang Yao is optimistic.

He believes that with the current trend of chemical development in California, most of the money loaned out can be recovered with interest.

"Does the land in Los Angeles also need money?" August is the person who knows America best among this group of people. He was very surprised that the land in Los Angeles needs to be purchased with money.

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

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

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

And the land in Los Angeles was directly bought by Liang Yao, almost at no cost, which is a deal with no capital and huge profits.

1851

Lionel and others were greatly surprised. Could it be that this guy had the ability to predict the future? He had set his eyes on the land here two years ago.

Leonel had not paid much attention to the land of this new world before. In fact, the entire Rothschild family was not optimistic about the prospects of the new world, and the investment was limited.

I didn't expect that in the new world of this new world, there is a place like California 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.

"Such a vibrant and business-filled place, I now want to open a branch in California." Lionel sighed.

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

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

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

With the broad business prospects and huge profits of the petrochemical industry, it is entirely possible to grow independently into a behemoth.

Liang Yao is not surprised that Standard Oil's capital scale will exceed that of the American Group in the future. 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 the dollars of thousands of ordinary American families to flow into his pockets.

Lionel and others looked at the black viscous liquid extracted from the ground with curiosity, and they were amazed: "Transparent kerosene is extracted from these black liquids? How did you find it?"

"This is a trade secret. I can only tell you that there are very good chemists in California. They are good at creation and turning waste into treasure." Liang Yao said in a mysterious way.

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.

"How much crude oil can such a well produce every day?" James asked about the output of crude oil.

"I want the oil workers to help me answer this question more convincingly." Liang Yao asked the oil workers who were working at the pump.

These oil workers were immigrants who had just arrived in Los Angeles not long ago. Their English was very poor. Since Los Angeles is a city dominated by Chinese, the demand for English was not very high.

Therefore, even if they were all old immigrants in 1850, the English level of old Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles was worse than that of old Chinese immigrants in San Francisco and Sacramento.

For Chinese immigrants in San Francisco or Sacramento, if they don't know English, their lives will be affected to some extent. However, for Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles, language problems have never been a problem.

On the contrary, white immigrants in Los Angeles are more troubled by language problems, because the kerosene merchants 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 the Guangzhou merchants, only a few Chinese businessmen can speak 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 checked these wooden barrels loaded with oil, and the wooden barrels clearly marked the capacity of each barrel as 150 liters.

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