How It Began

When a need exists something usually comes along to fill it. Someone discovered that the rock peddled by the Indians as medi­cine had another and more valuable use. When purified, it would burn in a lamp with a much brighter, cleaner light than whale oil, and it was cheaper. It was also found, when crude oil was analysed that if the heavy part could be separated it would make a fine lubricant to grease wagon wheels, mill machinery, and steam engines.

With the prospect of such promising mar­kets, promoters began to lease lands with oil springs on them. First they tried to collect the floating oil by skimming it from the top of the water. This method, however, was slow and expensive, so they be­gan to look for a better way to get at the oil which they knew was locked in the ground.

The Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, Connecticut, had leased

Chapter One

some land near Titusville, Pennsylvania. They hired a man named Ed­win L.Drake to go to Pennsylvania, inspect their skimming operation there, and try to find some way to increase production.

10 Drake knew nothing about the oil business; but he was an intelli­
gent man, and he liked the idea of facing a new problem and conquer­
ing it. He decided to try, something different than skimming oil from
the water.

11 He knew-tbat oil had been found in salt wells, so he reasoned that
an oil well might be the answer. He hired a crew and set them to
digging, amid the jeers of the townpeople, who thought that anybody
who would dig a well to find oil must be as crazy as a loon. When the
hole had gone down fifteen feet, one of the workmen suddenly stared
at the ground beside his shovel. Then he looked up and yielded, " Oil!
We've struck oil! "

11 Then Colonel Drake - he had been given the title of " colonel" by

his employers to make him sound more important in Titusville - decid­ed to try a new method used by salt makers who, instead of digging a large hole with pick and shovel drilled a very small hole by pounding into the ground a length of- steel pipe with a sharp drill screwed to the end of it. He hired a salt-well digging grew with their.equipment and a six-horsepower-steam engine to run it. They set up their derrick and started drilling. The drill sank rapidly through the soft.surface earth until it hit bedrock and began began into it; then" water began to rise until the hole was just a mushy puddle. The driller stopped his engine and shrugged his shoulders. There was no point in digging

The History of Oil

deeper, because as soon as the drill was removed the hole would cave in.

Some stories have it that while Drake sat discouraged, looking down sadly into his tall stovepipe hat, the shape of it gave him the idea of making a casing for the well. One day he appeared with a wagonload of iron pipe which he proposed to use instead of the trunk of a hollow tree. With a battering ram made from a tree trunk, his men drove lengths of pipe into the spongy ground until their casing reached bedrock. Now the rock drilling could begin once more, and the hole wouldn't cave in.

Drilling for this well had begun in the early months of the year 1859. By Saturday night, August 28, the hole was sixty-nine and one half feet deep, and still there was no sign of oil. Colonel Drake's backers had dropped out; on that fateful night he had a letter in his hand directing him to drop the project and return home.

On Sunday morning, the driller was passing the silent drill rig and locked down into the hole. What he saw made him reach excitedly for a dipper on a string and drop it hastily into the hole. Up it came -dripping, running over with rich black petroleum!

Colonel Drake's idea had paid off! At last a way had been found to bring up oil from the earth in large quantities. The Colonel's Drake drill had gone down through layer after layer of rocks and sand and mud until it reached the pool of oil imprisoned between layers of dense rock. As soon as the hole was clear through the rock, gas pressure forced the oil up through the pipe to the surface, where it could be run into storage tanks.