Drake's well — first commercial oil
On August 27, 1859, Edwin Drake's drilled well near Titusville, Pennsylvania struck oil at 69 feet. The 'Seneca Oil Company' had been formed to exploit oil seeps that local farmers had skimmed for years to make a folk-medicine product. Drake's innovation was the iron drive pipe, which let drilling proceed through soft sediment without the bore caving in. Within a year, Pennsylvania had hundreds of wells, towns named Petroleum Center and Pithole, and a chaotic boom that crashed prices from $20 a barrel to under 10 cents within months. Oil's first lesson — that supply expands faster than demand can absorb — was learned in the first eighteen months of the industry.
Drake himself died in poverty. He held no patent on the drive pipe, made bad investments in oil stocks, and was eventually granted a small Pennsylvania state pension. The pattern of the early oil industry — a few prospectors, a brief fortune, a quick crash — was set in his lifetime and would repeat for fifty years before the industry was finally consolidated.
03 · Black Gold
Oil arrived as a curiosity — a medicine, a lamp fuel, a substitute for whale oil — and within fifty years had become the most strategic commodity on Earth. The first commercial well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859. By 1911 a single American family controlled most of the world's refined oil. By 1914 the British Royal Navy had switched from coal to oil at Churchill's insistence, and the country with the best oil reserves was no longer Britain. The 20th century is, in plain economic terms, the century the energy capital moved from Tyneside to Texas — and from Texas, eventually, to Riyadh.
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