It’s August 27, the anniversary of the first successful oil well (at least in the US), in Titusville, Pennsylvania. People knew about oil in the 1850s, of course. In some parts of the world you could get the stuff out of freestanding pools (like tar pits), and it had been used for thousands of years for things like tarring roads. In China, they’d been using it for fuel since at least 400 BCE. There was even a practice of pounding bamboo poles into the ground to extract it.
Petroleum (Latin for “rock oil”) was used as medicine, too. For animals and people — luckily it was usually diluted, but sure enough, you’d just drink the gunk and it was supposed to do you good. Then in 1848 it got more valuable, when James Young found a way to distill it into something he called “paraffine oil” that could be used to light lamps and make wax.
Kerosene was next, and in 1853 two more inventions came along that boosted the value of petroleum simply because you could make kerosene with it: the kerosene lamp and the streetlight. They were both invented, along with kerosene, by Ignacy Łukasiewicz, a Polish pharmacist.
Lighting was a big deal in the mid 1800s. The western world was just beginning to resemble something we’d find (sort of) familiar, and they needed light for factory buildings and to extend workdays. Sure, you could use whale oil, but it was expensive, and wasn’t even available everywhere. And candles were so 1700s, y’know?
Anyway, in 1854 Łukasiewicz set up an “oil mine” in Krosno, in southeast Poland, and set up the first apparatus we’d recognize as an “oil well.” It yielded enough petroleum to distill into kerosene, but he ran into an innovator’s dilemma — even though he’d invented kerosene, and a lamp to use it, there just wasn’t that much demand for the stuff. Yet. So he distilled most of his petroleum into asphalt and lubricating oil. And possibly medicine, too — he was originally a pharmacist, remember.
But back to Titusville, Pennsylvania, and two people: Sam Kier and Ed Drake. Kier was a businessman who owned a couple of coal mines in Pennsylvania, as well as a salt business. To get salt, he drilled a well to extract brine, then just let the water evaporate. But he had a problem: his salt brine wells kept getting fouled with petroleum. At first he just dumped the annoying stuff, but then began to wonder if he could find a use for it. He may have heard about other people distilling petroleum, and he (or his employees) worked out a way to do it. He formed another company called “Seneca Oil,” and at first just sold the stuff in bottles as patent medicine — and it was pricy, too, at 50 cents per bottle. He also sold an ointment he called “petroleum butter” — now it’s called petroleum jelly. Then he heard about kerosene, and he or his staff worked out a way to distill that, too.
Suddenly Kier found himself in need of more of the gunk that he’d originally just dumped because it was getting in the way of his salt. Ed Drake was a retired railroad conductor who happened to be staying in the same hotel as Kier one day, and wound up being hired by Seneca Oil to investigate the possibility of oil deposits in Titusville. He got the job not because he had any particular skill in finding oil — it was because as a retired railroad worker, he got to ride the train to Titusville for free.
Salt brine wells like Kier’s were well known, and Drake decided to try that approach. He hired drillers (at the time, guys with shovels) to dig near a place called “Oil Creek.” But when they got about 16 feet down, they discovered the soil wasn’t stable enough and the sides started to collapse. The keen mind of the retired conductor sprung into action, and he decided to go deeper by driving an iron pipe down into the earth. By August, crowds of people were gathering around what they were calling “Drake’s Folly” — but then on the 27th, when they’d driven the pips down about 70 feet, some crude oil bubbled up. Drake had found a way to extract oil.
Drake’s oil well and Kier’s kerosene (he called it “carbon oil”) created the foundation of the oil business. Kerosene lamps caught on fast, and the oil boom started. It wasn’t that long before oil was powering everything from jet engines (the first jet airplane flew on August 27, 1939) to power plants (until August 27, 1956, when the first commercial nuclear plant went online in England).
As for the medical uses of petroleum, well, petroleum jelly is still around and used as a kind of ointment. And there’s petroleum in more kinds of food than you might want to know about — you could probably find it in “pots de créme,” the French custard dessert that you really ought to have today, since August 27 is National Pots de Créme day. But there’s no petroleum in bananas — and it just so happens that today is National Banana Lovers day, too.
