Edwin L. Drake

Edwin L. Drake

Edwin Laurentine Drake (born March 29, 1819 in Greenville , Greene County , New York ; † November 8, 1880 in Bethlehem , Pennsylvania ), also called Colonel Drake , was the first American to successfully drill for oil . He was drilling on behalf of the American industrialist George Henry Bissell and came across the first American oil well near Titusville , Pennsylvania on August 27, 1859 at a depth of just 21.2 meters. Ten years after the gold rush, the oil boom began in America.

Life

Drake spent his first years in the country and grew up in Castleton ( Vermont on). There he received a school education and worked in agriculture . He came home when he was 19, but only to try his luck in the Midwest afterwards . Drake had jobs as ship and hotel clerk, goods seller, rail express deliverer and train driver in the sometimes dangerous transport of the young railroad. In 1849 he became a train driver with the New Haven Railroad .

In 1854 his first wife died in childbed and left him a four-year-old son. In 1857 Drake decided to marry Laura Dowd for the second time. In the summer of that year, however, he became so ill that he lost his job with the railway, but was allowed to keep some of its privileges. When he was in New Haven ( Connecticut lived), he has been with owners of Pennsylvania skirt Oil Company known and acquired some shares.

In 1858, Drake took his wife, one-year-old son Alfred and eight-year-old son George with him to Titusville. The family only lived in the hotel until they had their own house in 1860. Another son (Charles) was born two years later. In 1865 a daughter (Mary Laura) was added.

At that time Drake had to use a wheelchair because he was in poor health again. His wife supported the family by sewing and taking in boarders. The emergency spread in Titusville, and in 1873 residents of the city petitioned Pennsylvania Parliament for an annual pension of $ 1,500 for the family. It was approved and, after Drake's death, continued to be paid to his wife until her death in 1916.

In 1901 Edwin Drake's bones were transferred from Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) to Titusville and buried at the monument erected there on the grounds of the Woodlawn Cemetery .

Interest in crude oil

environment

Although oil had been known for a long time, there was no significant market for it. Oil has been an unwelcome by-product of drilling for salt deposits in the United States. A few times the oil enrichment was so great that the salt drilling was abandoned. Only one salt company in Kentucky bottled the oil and sold it as medicine from 1829 onwards.

As early as the 14th century, Indians of the Seneca tribe had been collecting the crude oil that gushed out along Oil Creek , using it as medicine and also for exchange. In the 18th century, settlers in the region adopted the Seneca oil, which the Indians had driven away, for health purposes. The settlers dammed up streams, scooped up the oil floating on the surface of the water with paddles or woolen blankets, and used it to relieve joint pain or itchy skin. Others burned it in their lamps despite the black smoke and stench, or used the viscous pitch to lubricate their wagon wheels or the machinery in the sawmills .

At that time, homes were lit with lamp oil , mainly obtained from whaling . Towards the end of the 1840s, the price of oil rose sharply because sperm whales had been hunted to near extinction. As a result, the demand for inexpensive alternatives in lighting and lubricants grew. Meanwhile , the Canadian Abraham Gesner had found a method for extracting oil from coal . The end product called “ petroleum ” found its way onto the market and was manufactured in the factory. Another was the carbon oil produced by Samuel M. Kier from crude oil, which accumulated in his salt mine inherited from his father and which he had previously sold as medicine. Kier began distilling his crude oil into lamp oil. In 1858 it was sold in large quantities in New York City , where the product quickly pushed the more dangerous and expensive lamp oils off the market. Northwest Pennsylvania petroleum also became the preferred lubricant in the textile industry . The price per gallon rose from originally 75 cents to two dollars, which promised investors further earning opportunities. Studies of crude oil indicated that if enough could be extracted, it would be a good source of petroleum.

Corporations

In 1851, Dr. Francis B. Brewer has returned to Titusville from Dartmouth College to join his father's lumber company. Curious about what could be done with oil, he took a barrel full of crude oil from a well at the upper sawmill to Dartmouth College in 1853. There it was examined by the chemists and classified as extremely valuable.

Another college graduate, New York attorney George Henry Bissell , saw the crude oil and said it could be commercially viable. In November 1854 he and a partner bought the land around the oil well. On December 30, 1854, both founded the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company of New York and looked for further investors. But people, undecided about the value of the oil, hesitated to invest and awaited an opinion from Professor Benjamin Silliman Jr. of Yale University . This confirmed the economic potential of the sample.

Silliman described that the distillation of crude oil can produce kerosene (for lighting), gasoline (whose use is still uncertain), paraffin (for candle production), lubricants (for machines), benzene (as a solvent) and tar (for road construction).

The appraisal has now moved some New Haven speculators to inject money into the company on condition that the company be relocated to Connecticut, where more liberal laws prevailed. On September 18, 1855, the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company of Connecticut was created . Frictions among the shareholders led to another reorganization and finally the Seneca Oil Company was formed in March 1858. She hired Edwin Drake as her agent general with an annual salary of $ 1,000 and hired him to begin oil production. Drake's employers were looking for crude oil for their new company to manufacture kerosene for lamps.

If you follow Ida Tarbell's book The History of Standard Oil (1904), oil drilling was not Drake's idea, but rather that of his employer George H. Bissell. Bissell sent Drake on his way in the spring of 1858.

Drake's oil wells

Titusville today

The Seneca Oil Company hired Edwin Drake to mine the suspected oil deposits in Titusville. The oil company chose the retired railway man maybe just because he was allowed to travel for free by train. In 1857 and 1858, Drake searched for oil in and around Titusville . To add glamor to their general agent, the managers simply introduced Drake as "Colonel". He had not completed any military service, let alone as a colonel .

Drake initially thought it best to dig for oil, but groundwater quickly failed; so he decided to drill. Drake went to Tarentum, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh to learn salt drilling and to look for an experienced specialist. He bought the necessary equipment and got an old steam engine to sink the hole. In Titusville he built a machine house for this purpose and erected a derrick until winter forced an interruption. William A. Smith, an experienced drill specialist and blacksmith in Tarentum, worked for him from the spring of 1859 and manufactured drilling equipment.

Drake's success was limited in the beginning because the team was only able to produce a maximum output of 10  barrels (1.6 m³) per day. That was not enough for economic exploitation. The attempts to dig very large shafts in the ground failed because of the groundwater infiltration. Drake opted for a salt-drilling approach. The derrick was built on an artificial island in Oil Creek . It took some time for the drills to penetrate the layers of gravel. At 16  feet (5 m) the sides of the hole collapsed. His helpers began to despair, but not Drake.

He now came up with the idea of ​​driving by means of a pipe. This iron pipe consisted of 10 foot long connectors. The pipes were gradually driven into the ground. At 32 feet (10 m) they hit rocky ground. The drill rig was now lowered through the pipe and steam was used to drill through the bedrock and bring the spoil up. However, this was extremely slow.

Meanwhile, ridicule of Drake's seemingly unproductive operation began to grow. Drake ran out of money. Amazingly, the Seneca Oil Company had also abandoned its husband and Drake had to count on friends to support the project.

By August 27, 1859, Drake had held out when his bit reached a total depth of 69.5 feet (21 m). At that point the tip hit a crack and sagged. The men packed up for the day. The next morning, Drake's drill specialist "Billy" Smith looked into the borehole to prepare for the new day's work. He saw crude oil rising. Drake was called and the oil was cranked to the surface with a hand pump and collected in a bathtub.

The news of the success spread in the area at lightning speed. The well initially delivered around 4,000 liters per day, but decreased relatively quickly to a flow rate of 1,500 liters.

consequences

Because oil exploration was already taking place in the conventional manner on some neighboring claims , the Drake well was quickly copied as a successful new approach. Just a day after his oil success, Drake's methods were being emulated along Oil Creek and in the surrounding area. An oil rush broke out in the area because apparently easy-to-earn money was luring them. This culminated in the establishment of some oil boom towns along the river. A year later, approximately 2,000 drill holes were encountered in northwest Pennsylvania. Around 1865, the nearby Pithole City produced almost 2/3 of the world's oil for a few months.

Drake formed a corporation for oil production and marketing. But while his pioneering work led to the growth of an oil industry that made many people fabulous, Drake's fortunes remained modest. Drake had no good business acumen. He failed in patenting his drilling tool invention. Then he lost all of his savings in an oil speculation in 1863. In the autumn of his life he was an impoverished man. After a petition from citizens, Pennsylvania began paying the family a pension from 1873. He did so in recognition of his contribution to the common good to the "mad man" whose determination ushered in the emergence of the oil industry .

Others

Drake's life is also taken up in the volume In the Shadow of the Oil Rigs in the Lucky Luke comic series .

Edwin L. Drake was one of the first pioneers of the oil age, but the commercial exploitation of an oil well began as early as 1858 in Canada by businessman James Miller Williams in Oil Springs , Lambton County .

Web links

• At the beginning of the petroleum age
• Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission: Edwin L. Drake
• Drake Well Museum in Titusville, Pennsylvania

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Titusville, Pennsylvania, 1896 . 1896. Retrieved July 16, 2013.
2. ↑ 150 years of the oil age . In: Der Spiegel . No. 18 , 2008, p. 145 ( online ).