Branobel, one of the largest oil companies in the world, is active mostly in the oil-rich region around Baku (now Azerbaijan).

Short for Brothers Nobel, Ludvig and Robert Nobel, brothers of Alfred Nobel, had founded Branobel in the Russian Empire in 1876.

Ludvig is a pioneer in the development of early oil tankers, who had first experimented with carrying oil in bulk on single-hulled barges.

Turning his attention to self-propelled tankships, he faces a number of challenges.

A primary concern is to keep the cargo and fumes well away from the engine room to avoid fires.

Other challenges include allowing for the cargo to expand and contract due to temperature changes, and providing a method to ventilate the tanks.

The world's first successful oil tanker is Nobel's Zoroaster.

He designs this ship in Gothenburg, Sweden, with Sven Almqvist.

The contract to build it is signed in January 1878, and it makes its first run later that year from Baku to Astrakhan.

The Zoroaster design is widely studied and copied, with Nobel refusing to patent any part of it.

In October 1878, he orders two more tankers of the same design: the Buddha and the Nordenskjöld.

Zoroaster carries its 242 long tons of kerosene cargo in two iron tanks joined by pipes.

One tank is forward of the midships engine room and the other is aft.

The ship also features a set of 21 vertical watertight compartments for extra buoyancy.

The ship has a length overall of 184 feet (56 m), a beam of 27 feet (8.2 m), and a draft of 9 feet (2.7 m).

Unlike later Nobel tankers, the Zoroaster design is built small enough to sail from Sweden to the Caspian by way of the Baltic Sea, Lake Ladoga, Lake Onega, the Rybinsk and Mariinsk Canals and the Volga River.

The oil firm Branobel experiences one of the first oil tanker disasters.

In 1881, the Zoroaster's sister-ship, the Nordenskjöld, explodes in Baku while taking on kerosene.

The pipe carrying the cargo is jerked away from the hold when the ship is hit by a gust of wind.

Kerosene then spills onto the deck and down into the engine room, where mechanics are working in the light of kerosene lanterns.

The ship then explodes, killing half the crew.

Ludvig Nobel responds to the disaster by creating a flexible, leak proof loading pipe that is much more resistant to spills.

The first oil well had been mechanically drilled in the Bibi-Heybat suburb of Baku in 1846, though a number of hand-dug wells predate it.

Large-scale oil exploration had begun in 1872, when Russian imperial authorities auctioned the parcels of oil-rich land around Baku to private investors.

Within a short period of time Swiss, British, French, Belgian, German, Swedish and American investors have appeared in Baku.

Among them are the firms of the Nobel brothers, together with the family von Börtzell-Szuch (Carl Knut Börtzell, who also owns the Livadia Palace) and the Rothschild family.

An industrial oil belt, better known as Black City, is established near Baku.

Ludvig Nobel, as head of Branobel, had begun to adopt a single-hull design, where the ship's hull forms part of its tank structure.

In November 1880, he had ordered his first single-hulled tanker, the Moses.

Within a year, he had ordered seven more single-hulled tankers: the Mohammed, Tatarin, Bramah, Spinoza, Socrates, Darwin, Koran, Talmud, and Calmuck.