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The barrels finally changed in 1905, when Nellie Bly patented the steel drum still used today. Bly designed her barrels to carry more oil, 55 gallons, and to leak less. Her invention also caused the barrel’s meaning to separate from its physical reality. Despite adoption of the new, larger barrels, the old 42-gallon quantity remained the industry unit of measure for a “barrel”—as it still does. The barrels people used to hold oil were no longer the barrels they used to talk about it. A barrel became a quantity of oil futures sold, or crude spilled, or latent energy stored.

The discrepancy between the barrel’s physical reality and its meaning in industry parlance didn’t do anything to solve the barrel problem. Bly had improved the barrels, but no barrels at all would still have been better for the oil business. Even better would be symbolic barrels that existed in name only, used to measure production and sales, but hidden from sight. To present a good public face, the barrels that did exist were painted in corporate colors and logos. Like advertisements, promotional films, and glossy service stations, colorful containers like Standard’s “holy blue barrels,” as the muckraker Ida Tarbell called them, sold as pleasant and diverting an image as possible.

Talking about barrels that weren’t real made perfect sense. They were part of how the industry presented its contribution, measured in the number of barrels produced, to the economy, national security, and the everyday happiness of a nation of drivers. Could there ever be too many “barrels” in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?

By the 1950s, the spread of pipelines, rail tanks, and tanker trucks meant that less and less oil needed to move in barrels. They found alternate use—in ports, for instance, where they transported raw materials and carried fuel for ships. But they also piled up in suburban junkyards as evidence of their looming obsolescence.

As waste objects, the barrels found new lives in the art world. As a young artist working in Paris, Christo Javacheff would drag them from the junkyard to his studio, where he learned to turn industrial objects into modern art by wrapping and stacking them. In 1962, less than a year after the construction of the Berlin Wall, he and his partner Jeanne-Claude used barrels to barricade Paris’s narrowest street. They called it the “Iron Curtain.” Their barrels—once icons of the global oil trade—became symbols of a world divided.

As objects, oil barrels have had many fates in the last half-century. Hobos and hippies turned the discarded ones into fireplaces. Trinidadian drummers turned them into steelpans. And a DIY manual for making your own barrel-bottom fire pit, trash can, planter, or kegerator is just clicks away.

For the oil industry, the 19th-century barrel problem has taken on new forms. In places like Nigeria, for instance, they support a thriving black market. Siphoned from leaky pipelines, this illicit oil moves in barrels again. Meanwhile scientists continue to search for better ways to move the stuff, perhaps even in a future without pipelines.