Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [24]
Oil was an alternative energy source then—a strange, mysterious substance in a world still using wind and water, wood and coal. Oil didn’t send cars zooming around or get turned into plastics back then. People all over the world burned it in lamps as a replacement for a set of illumination alternatives that weren’t quite right for the task. There was whale oil, but that was getting tougher to find. Whalers spent more and more months farther and farther away from population centers to fill up their barrels with bounty from the most majestic creatures in the world. And even if they killed a hundred whales, they were bringing back only a few hundred barrels of oil. There was pig-derived oil, too, along with gas made from coal. Historian Brian Black has found that there were already fifty-six coal-to-gas plants operating by 1850.2
Furthermore, new lamps introduced in the 1850s allowed consumers to burn pretty much anything they wanted, decreasing the cost of switching fuels. Black went on to note that after that
each illuminant helped bring light to darkness. However, each product left dramatic room for improvement. While each development functioned to lay groundwork for the rapid acceptance of petroleum upon its “discovery,” the coal oil industry, which grew significantly in the United States during the 1850s, achieved a national distribution network that could be shifted most easily to other fluid energy commodities.3
So there was a market and ecosystem awaiting the product that could fulfill “the divine potential of increasing time in the day.” Some people had discovered that “rock oil” could be distilled, just like whale oil, but it was too difficult to collect where it seeped up to the surface. People sometimes skimmed the crude from the surface of the waters where it naturally got stuck or they sopped it up with blankets. Some used it as a tonic: They “drank freely of the water, which, by and by, ‘operated as a gentle purge.’”4 Not exactly the way to go from rags to riches.
Nonetheless, some Yankee capitalists from Connecticut were convinced that oil could be found in the ground and exploited. They recruited “Colonel” Edwin Drake, who was not a colonel at all, but got away with the name mostly because he was charming and unknown in the region. He, in turn, found someone skilled in the art of drilling, or what passed for it in those days.
Drake and his sidekick “Uncle Billy” Smith started looking underground for oil in the spring of ’59. They used a heavy metal tip attached to a rope, sending it plummeting down the borehole like a ram to break up the rock. It was slow going. Working with a local machinist, they simply pounded a hole in the ground with a heavy piece of metal attached to a rope threaded through a pulley to a steam engine. It took weeks of “chipping” to go the sixty-nine feet down to the reservoir. On August 27, 1859, at sixty-nine feet of depth, Drake and Smith hit oil.5
“We have no language at our command by which to convey to the minds of our readers any adequate idea of the agitated state at the time we saw [the well]. The gas from below was forcing up immense quantities of oil in a fearful manner and attended with noise that was terrifying,” wrote Jim Burchfield, editor of the Titusville Gazette, on seeing one of the first wells ever sunk. He went on,
When the gas subsided for a few seconds, the oil rushed back down the pipe with a hollow, gurgling sound, so much resembling the struggle and suffocating breathings of a dying man, as to make one feel as though the earth were a huge giant seized with the pains of death and in its spasmodic efforts to retain a hold on life was throwing all nature into convulsions.6
Though oil had been drilled for in Canada before, Drake’s well and the huge industry it portended really did change everything. Oil wells pumped an immediately salable commodity out of the ground. Suddenly,