Young Drake held a number of railroading and sales positions before joining the newly established Seneca Oil company of Pennsylvania in 1857 as a minority shareholder. Rather, he demonstrated a point that oil could be extracted from the ground in significant, economically viable quantities.ĭrake was born in Greenville, New York, in 1819, and his early professional life did not foreshadow his role in revolutionizing the global petroleum industry forty years later. Drake, known as the “Colonel” of the early Pennsylvania oil industry, did not actually discover oil when he drilled for it beneath the earth in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in August of 1859. Given the high cost of sperm oil in Drake’s day, commercialization of the oil industry and the availability of less expensive petroleum products contributed to the end of commercial whaling. It is thought that by the 1850s, the sperm whale had been hunted almost to extinction. The classic whaling saga “Moby Dick,” written by Melville in 1851, is a moving testament to the whale hunt and its utter ruthlessness. The Northeastern United States-based whaling industry sent its ships all over the world in search of sperm whales to kill for their oil, which was primarily used as lamp fuel. Naturalists have proposed that the Drake oil well may have contributed to the survival of the sperm whale. Oil was found in Kern County, California, in 1861, and the first significant oil discovery in Texas was made in 1901. Oil drilling has evolved from Drake’s crude structure, shown here, into an industry with the capability to drill many miles below the earth’s surface, on land and by sea-anchored platforms.įollowing Drake’s discovery of the Pennsylvania oil fields, there was an oil rush, and other early oil drillers looked for other favorable terrain. Drake’s idea to drill a watertight housing into the earth in which the protected drill would operate is the fundamental principle at work in modern oil drilling operations. By the turn of the century, the early American petroleum industry-founded on the sale of lamp oil and Drake’s first well in Titusville-had grown to be a global behemoth.ĭrakes drilling methods, which were ground-breaking in 1859, are still the gold standard for extracting underground oil today. It was the development of the enormous variety of petroleum products that was poised to fundamentally alter the global economic system, particularly with the advent of the highly effective internal combustion engines that ran on gasoline. Oil refining evolved into a complex, multifaceted process as crude oil’s ability to contain a wide range of useful commercial products-including gasoline-began to gain recognition. Greater oil production from drilled wells prompted research into refinery processes as well as the search for additional, equally promising oil fields. The commercial viability of oil exploration, which Edwin Drake first demonstrated, had inevitably led to the development of the forerunner to the modern petroleum industry by the 1880s.
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