Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. covers this all in incredible detail, if it is something that interests you.
Furthermore, asserting that indoor lighting was a toy -- in an age where other light sources were dim, prohibitively expensive, or excessively smoky -- seems mistaken to me.
GP never made that claim. The point is that lamp oil was perceived as a toy before people realized the (blindingly obvious in hindsight) utility for indoor lighting.
Yes the economics were excellent. But very few actually wanted it for years. Oil was fun to set on fire, but hadn't found mainstream use yet. Rockefeller created and dominated the market.
Many of Rockefeller's early writings were about his frustrations of oil not being taken seriously. And he definitely agreed with you that it was a mistake to see oil lamps as toys.
Americans don't read either, though, they are too busy eating sufficient quantities to double their body fat. (I am American)
I'd also very strongly recommend Vaclav Smil's Energy and World History (1994) or the updated Energy and Civilization (2017). These describe history through the lens of energy sources, and the role of energy in that history.
Manfred Weisenbacher takes on much the same story in Sources of Power, which is a more comprehensive, if uneven, book. Excellently researched (and drawing heavily on Smil as well as many, many other sources), but could use some trimming and occasionally verges strongly to the polemical.
You could have solved your problem in a dozen other ways. You were privileged enough to do it in the way that presumable pleased you most. There is a hint of toyness to it in that respect.
> You could have solved your problem in a dozen other ways.
Hmm. And what ways would those be? First, I simplified when I said that "I" bought the monitor. It was a gift, bought for me, that I didn't have particular choice in. Second, I'm unaware of "a dozen" ways to solve the problem of displaying a computer's output. If you'd care to list the ones you're thinking of...
"in my book" is often used to cast a statement as opinion. So something "definitely" being X "in my book" is pretty clearly not meant to be any sort of argument (necessary! sufficient! proof! -- gag me with conversation killers) where I come from.
I don't think there's any good way to define a toy in any hard-and-fast way, so rubbing words like "necessary" on it is just not in play.
In the original discussion, lamp oil was interesting when framed as a toy. The background given was enough for me to think of it as such as part of the thought experiment. I gave a couple of dimensions that I think supported its toyness when some balked.
You could: 1) not have a monitor on your desk 2) use a smaller monitor 3) use a laptop 4) get a bigger desk
Each of these has a number of ways you might achieve them, easily meeting or exceeding the throw-away number I posited.
For example, with (1) you might use a school computer lab. Or you might eschew computer use altogether. Or you might borrow a computer when necessary. Or you might devise an alternate mounting scheme. Or you might get a lap desk, so you need less real-desk surface for other things.
Anyway, we're way off in some boring-ass woods. The woods that kept me from participating here for years.
Good day, human.
Water tended to be transported in viaducts (or occasionally tunnels). Longer runs might be made of clay. Even firing that required tremendous amounts of fuel in a fuel-starved world.
The advent of Bessemer steel, machine tools, railroads (and steel rather than wrought-iron rails, far stronger and less prone to splitting), and mechanical pumps, allowed pipelines to be built.
The first that I'm aware of were deployed along Oil Creek in Titusville, Pennsylvania, home of the U.S. petroleum industry. Contemporaneous accounts discuss the development of those pipelines.
Long, interstate pipelines came out of World War II. The U.S. had been shipping oil from Texas to New Jersey via tankers, but German U-boats were sinking these by the hundreds. The U.S. government financed the construction of the Big Inch and Little Inch pipelines, which remain in use.