Stapleton Oil Well Number One
Kansas
On October sixth, nineteen fifteen, this spot changed Kansas. A well called Stapleton Number One struck oil and opened the great El Dorado field. What made it famous was not just the oil, but how it was found.
Stapleton Number One was among the first wells in the world located by science, drilled where geologists predicted oil should be, rather than by guesswork. They were right. The field that followed produced a staggering amount of crude, by nineteen eighteen nearly thirteen percent of the nation's output, vital fuel for the United States in the First World War.
El Dorado itself exploded from a town of three thousand people to more than ten thousand in just three years. The discovery proved that reading the rocks beneath the ground could find oil, and it helped turn petroleum geology into a serious profession.
