![]() ![]() Drake's main qualifications as a drilling engineer were, one, that he was available and, two, his lifetime railroad pass enabled him to ride back and forth to Pennsylvania for free. He had worked for the railroad as a station clerk and a freight agent and a conductor but had been forced to retire due to infirmity. At thirty-eight years of age, he boasted no special training and no experience. ![]() Drake, it was decided, would be the man to helm the first drilling project. One who listened and was intrigued enough to buy a few shares in the enterprise was Edwin Drake, who lived in the same hotel as Townsend. Bissell's partner James Townsend reported after one pitch that the naysayers chided him: "Oh, Townsend, oil coming out of the ground, pumping oil out of the earth as you pump water? Nonsense! You're crazy.” The Dream Comes Togetherīissell and Townsend trundled on, spewing their plans for most anyone who would listen. There were not many takers in the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company. Furthermore, it became Bissell's plan to drill for the oil in a way that salt had been obtained for hundreds of years.īissell commissioned a report from one of the leading scientists of the day, Benjamin Silliman, Jr., to verify the energy potential of rock oil and began making the rounds in New York City to convince investors in his scheme. When he saw how readily the inky black liquid burned Bissell immediately saw its potential as an illuminant and not as a medicinal salve. Rather, in 1853 he was a 32-year old struggling lawyer when he saw samples of "rock oil" from western Pennsylvania on the campus of Dartmouth College in his hometown of Hanover, New Hampshire. George Henry Bissell was not one of those obsessed with kerosene. Finding petroleum for these proliferating cheap "kerosene lamps" stoked the fire of the day's entrepreneurs. Kerosene burned smokily and smelled awful but tinkerers soon discovered that a lamp with a glass chimney solved both problems. Indoor illuminants at the time relied on whale oil which was, of course, difficult and dangerous to obtain and expensive - $2.50 a gallon at a time when a good day's wage was less than one dollar. ![]() He called the distillate "kerosene" and those in attendance that day were on hand for the birth of the oil refining industry. During one demonstration Gessner showed how oil distilled from bituminous coal could be used to light a lamp. Abraham Gessner, who was trained as a physician in England but spent his life in geological work in his native Canada instead, was performing public lectures in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. The creation of the oil well fundamentally altered the course of the 20th century. Instead of harvesting oil in a pail or sopping it up with rags and wrung out by hand over barrels, oil wells produced thousands of barrels of oil. Edwin Drake's oil fundamentally changed this process and dramatically increased oil production around the world. But by the middle of the 19th century methods for collecting oil from the ground had not changed for thousands of years. Oil was known in antiquity when it was used to heal wounds. Even though there was no one "first discover" of oil. ![]()
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