William Henry McGarvey

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William Henry McGarvey (born November 20, 1843 in Huntingdon (Québec) , † November 27, 1914 in Vienna ) was a Canadian oil pioneer.

Life

His parents Edward and Sarah had emigrated from Northern Ireland to Huntington, Quebec in the early 1840s , where he was born in 1843. At the age of 16 the family moved to Wyoming, Ontario and opened a business there. In 1862 he hitchhiked to the oil fields, where he learned how to drill, refine and market petroleum and met the oil greats like Fairbank, Williams, Vaughn and Shaw. He successfully drilled himself in Oil Springs and from 1866 in Petrolia (Ontario) . Here he also opened his Mammoth Store and married Helena J. Wesolowska from Mount Clemens, Michigan, with whom he had the children Nellie, Frederick and Mary (* 1876).

McGarvey developed new drilling techniques. He equipped his derrick with runners so that they could be moved from well to well. He also developed a rotary drilling technique that he powered with steam engines.

In 1876 he was elected Mayor of Petrolia and in 1879 Governor of Lambton County .

The British-American engineer and businessman John Simeon Bergheim , who was born in Palestine, was looking for a drilling team for Germany, but couldn't find anything in the USA and came to Canada. As the drilling in Petrolia subsided, Bergheim and McGarvey partnered and joined the United Continental Oil Company in the Prussian province of Hanover, which McGarvey soon ran. After they did not find anything in Wietze on Hermann Gellermanns Willskoppel even at a depth of 400 m, they moved on to Galicia, Austria at the time (e.g. in Klimkówka ).

For the test drillings, he introduced his drilling method in Galicia in 1882, which allowed him to progress one meter per hour. After six months they found what they were looking for and were producing 30,000 barrels of crude oil per day. They obtained the tools from the Oil Well Supply Co. of Petrolia. McGarvey bought out competitors and the Bergheim & Mac Garvey company soon gained control of the Austro-Hungarian oil world. In 1884 he had his wife and children come and lived in Boryslaw .

In November 1895 his daughter Mary Helen "Mamie" married Count Eberhard (Friedrich Alexander Joseph Eduard) Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1869–1926), a grandson of Friedrich von Zeppelin . In the same year the company was transformed into a stock corporation, the Galizische Karpathen-Petroleum-AG . Carl Benz had just built his first car.

Crude oil refineries were built in Bratislava and Marijampolė . In 1905 a productive oil field was opened in Tustanowice with the Bukowice shaft and the Dombovka II shaft.

In 1906 Bergheim moved to the south of the British colony of Nigeria to explore for oil , where he had received a six-year monopoly. The British Royal Navy had switched from coal to oil and was looking for closer sources. By 1912 Bergheim had opened 15 springs between the Lekki lagoon and the Niger Delta when he was killed in a car accident in a London taxi. Shell only resumed work here 25 years later.

In 1911, McGarvey's brother James was shot dead by an employee during political unrest at the Grozny plant.

In 1914, at the beginning of the First World War, the Maryampol refinery was badly damaged in fighting and the paraffin plant was completely destroyed. McGarvey died penniless in an Austrian internment camp.

The refinery was able to resume full operation in August 1917 and took over a dozen other oil companies and refineries in 1925.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.canadianpetroleumhalloffame.ca/william-mcgarvey.html
  2. ↑ http://genforum.genealogy.com/mcgarvey/messages/310.html
  3. ↑ http://www.clicksigns.ca/users/brian/html/McGARVEY.html
  4. ↑ Petroleum, 9th vol., No. 5 v. December 3, 1913, p. 325 f.
  5. ↑ http://www.albertasource.ca/petroleum/anniversary/con_polishconnection.html
  6. ^ Factor oil: the mineral oil industry in Germany 1859-1974 ; By Rainer Karlsch, Raymond G. Stokes; P. 40
  7. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from March 12, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ http://www.gen-gen.ch/von-ZEPPELIN/Eberhard/105790
  9. ↑ http://www.aktiensammler.de/br/archiv_laender_detail.asp?AREA=PL&ID=82084&SID=5666649115213136
personal data
SURNAME McGarvey, William Henry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian oil pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH November 20, 1843
PLACE OF BIRTH Huntingdon (Quebec)
DATE OF DEATH November 27, 1914
Place of death Vienna