Events

Edwin Drake's drill bit punched through bedrock at a depth of 69 feet near Titusville, Pennsylvania, on August 27, 1859, and struck a reservoir of crude oil. The well produced roughly 25 barrels per day, a modest flow that launched the petroleum industry and reshaped civilization more thoroughly than any single resource discovery in modern history. Drake was not a geologist or an engineer. He was a former railroad conductor hired by the Seneca Oil Company because he held a free railroad pass, which made him cheap to transport to northwestern Pennsylvania. Locals called him "Crazy Drake" as they watched him spend months trying to drill through waterlogged soil near Oil Creek, where petroleum had seeped to the surface for centuries. Native Americans had long collected the oil for medicinal use, and Samuel Kier had been selling "rock oil" as a patent medicine. But nobody had drilled for it deliberately on a commercial scale. Drake's key innovation was driving an iron pipe casing through the surface soil to bedrock, preventing the borehole from collapsing and flooding with groundwater. His driller, William Smith, adapted techniques from salt well boring. When oil began filling the pipe on that Saturday afternoon, Drake initially collected it in a bathtub. Within days, word spread and speculators descended on Titusville. Within months, the countryside was covered with derricks. Within a year, oil production in the region had exploded and the price had crashed from twenty dollars a barrel to ten cents. The timing was critical. Whale oil, the primary illumination fuel, was becoming scarce and expensive as whale populations were hunted toward extinction. Kerosene refined from petroleum offered a cheaper, more abundant alternative. John D. Rockefeller built Standard Oil into the world's most powerful corporation on the back of Pennsylvania crude. The automobile, the airplane, modern plastics, industrial agriculture, and the geopolitics of the twentieth century all trace their origins to a 69-foot hole in the ground outside a small Pennsylvania town. Drake himself never patented his drilling method and died nearly penniless in 1880.

Four explosions ripped through the volcanic island of Krakatoa on August 27, 1883, the last of them producing the loudest sound in recorded human history. The detonation at 10:02 AM local time was heard 3,110 kilometers away in Perth, Australia, and on the island of Rodrigues near Mauritius, 4,800 kilometers across the Indian Ocean, where residents mistook it for cannon fire from a nearby ship. The eruption killed more than 36,000 people and altered global weather for years. Krakatoa, located in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, had been erupting intermittently since May 1883, sending ash columns into the sky and generating loud explosions audible in distant cities. Local shipping continued through the strait despite the activity. On August 26, the eruption intensified dramatically. By the morning of August 27, the volcano entered its catastrophic phase. The first explosion at 5:30 AM triggered a tsunami that struck the town of Telok Betong. The second, at 6:44 AM, sent waves east and west. The third and most powerful blast ejected an estimated 25 cubic kilometers of rock and ash, releasing energy equivalent to 200 megatons of TNT, roughly four times the yield of the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. The final explosion at 10:41 AM collapsed half of Rakata volcano into the sea, generating tsunamis exceeding 30 meters that swept away entire coastal towns on Java and Sumatra. The town of Merak was destroyed by a wave that carried a steamship nearly a mile inland. Pyroclastic flows raced across the surface of the ocean, reaching the Sumatran coast and killing thousands who had believed the water would protect them. The pressure wave circled the Earth seven times, registering on barographs worldwide for five days. Ash propelled 80 kilometers into the atmosphere spread across the globe, producing vivid red sunsets for months. Global temperatures dropped by an estimated 1.2 degrees Celsius and did not return to normal for five years. The eruption destroyed two-thirds of the island, but volcanic activity continued. In 1927, a new island, Anak Krakatau (Child of Krakatoa), emerged from the caldera and has been growing and erupting ever since, a reminder that the forces beneath the Sunda Strait are far from spent.