![]() But the great Yale chemist Benjamin Silliman, under contract to Townsend and his fellow investors, had speculated that “rock oil” could have additional industrial uses as a lubricant or illuminant. The principal value of the product was as a patent medicine. A day’s work of soaking a woolen cloth in the sheen on top of the water and wringing out the yield or skimming the slick substance with a flat piece of wood might derive a gallon or so of the brown liquid. Since prehistoric times, and certainly since the days when the northwestern regions of Pennsylvania were inhabited by the Seneca Indians, most of the petroleum that had ever been produced was laboriously scraped and soaked from the smooth surfaces of streams and ponds. So with this in mind, Drake the railroad conductor invested his life’s savings in the venture. Others had attempted something similar, and lost their shirt at it. Well, no one had ever been successful at such a task. No one had ever done anything like it before, anywhere. The stated goal was to extract petroleum from the earth, in then-unprecedented quantities, by means of boring a hole in the ground. But Drake knew how to work hard and stick to a task, a characteristic often as valuable as all other skills put together.Īnd as these kinds of things happen, the Connecticut businessman Townsend offered the railroad conductor Drake an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the Seneca Oil Company’s entrepreneurial speculation. One could say that Drake, with his limited perspective, was in the good company of most other men of the time, because industrial-scale production of oil was a business that had not yet been invented. As any employer can tell you, it is hard to screen for destiny in an employee. Perhaps in this regard, Drake was neither better nor worse than anyone else for the job that he was to be assigned. Drake had spent a lifetime working with his hands, but to his credit he understood tools and how to use them. Still, Drake knew nothing about even the rudiments of land and leases, or legal contracts, or general business principles. One day, Drake and Townsend had a talk.īy background and training, the wanderer and newly-minted railroad conductor Drake knew nothing of the business of extracting oil, not that anyone else knew much more back in those days. Townsend needed investors for his fledgling company, and even more importantly, he needed a man on the ground to do the hard physical work of the venture. Townsend, who became something of an acquaintance of Drake’s, was a promoter of the Seneca Oil Company, a Connecticut corporation formed to locate and extract petroleum near the oil seeps of the rural hills and valleys of western Pennsylvania. One of Drake’s frequent passengers on the railroad was a New Haven man named James Townsend. ![]() ![]() It was steady work, and the pay came on time. He had wandered the countryside looking for odd jobs, worked as a farmhand, a store clerk, and a deckhand on an ore freighter and never earned more than $50 in any given month. Born in 1818 in a small town in upstate New York, Edwin Drake had cut a simple and rather undistinguished path during his first 40 years on Earth. Working on the railroad was the best employment he had ever had in his life. His most recent occupation was that of a train conductor on the New York, New Haven and Long Island Railroad, a high-tech kind of job in the late 1850s. ![]() He was certainly not commissioned in any military organization. Through the exploitation of plentiful oil, the world was at first lubricated and illuminated… and then over the next 145 years mechanized, motorized and plasticized.” By achieving his “Conquest of the Rock,” Colonel Drake demonstrated that it was possible to extract oil in industrial quantities. “The world of the 1850s was a place of raw animal power, supplemented on occasion with energy derived from wind, burning wood, falling water or hard-won coal from pits dug into the sides of hills. ![]()
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