Drake's Well and the Birth of the Oil Industry

On the morning of August twenty-eighth, eighteen fifty-nine, a former railroad conductor named Edwin Drake and his driller, William Uncle Billy Smith, checked on an experimental well they had been boring into the hillside above Oil Creek in northwestern Pennsylvania. The day before, they had hit a crevice at sixty-nine and a half feet and stopped drilling. Overnight, oil had seeped up through the pipe and filled the casing.

Drake lowered a tin cup into the well. It came up coated in dark, thick crude. They had found petroleum.

Not oil seeping at the surface, which Pennsylvania settlers had known about for decades and used as a patent medicine and axle grease, but oil in a drilled well, recoverable in quantity. Within weeks, the news had traveled to New York and Boston. Within months, the western Pennsylvania wilderness around Titusville had been transformed into one of the most frenzied industrial landscapes in American history.

The timing was significant. The American whaling industry was in decline. The sperm whale oil that lit much of the nation's lamps was becoming scarce and expensive.

Petroleum, refined into kerosene, could replace it. A new industry was not just possible; it was immediately necessary. By eighteen sixty, Titusville had oil refineries, oil speculators, and oil millionaires.

By eighteen sixty-five, Standard Oil's predecessor companies were beginning to consolidate control over refining in Cleveland, Ohio, drawing their raw material from Pennsylvania wells. Drake himself made little from the discovery. He had never thought to patent his drilling method, the use of a driven iron pipe as a casing, which was the key technical innovation that made the well work.

He died nearly broke in eighteen eighty, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The well he drilled in eighteen fifty-nine is considered the founding moment of the global petroleum industry. The world has been running on its logic ever since, in ways that Drake could not have imagined and would perhaps not have wished.