Titusville Strikes Oil: Birth of the Petroleum Age

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.