The Train Conductor Who Drilled Into the Modern World

It's Thursday, August twenty seventh.

On this day in eighteen fifty nine, a retired train conductor named Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania and started the modern world. He had no experience in geology. He had never drilled a well in his life. He got the job for one reason: he still had a free rail pass from his railroad days, which meant he could travel between New Haven and Titusville without costing his investors a penny. The well he drilled was sixty nine feet deep. Everything we now take for granted, gasoline, plastics, asphalt, synthetic fabrics, starts with that hole in the ground and a man who had no idea what he was doing.

For most of human history, oil was a nuisance. If you were a farmer in western Pennsylvania, or western New York, or anywhere with the right geology, oil was the black stuff that seeped into your well and ruined your water. It bubbled up from the ground along creeks and formed slicks on the surface. There is a reason one of those creeks was named Oil Creek. People had been skimming it off the surface for centuries. Native Americans used it as a medicine and a sealant. Early American settlers collected small amounts from natural seeps and sold it as a cure for rheumatism, colic, and pretty much anything else. But nobody wanted very much of it, because nobody had a use for very much of it.

The substance people actually wanted was whale oil. In the eighteen fifties, whale oil was the primary fuel for lamps. It burned bright. It burned clean. It was also becoming impossibly expensive. Whale populations had been hunted to near collapse. A gallon of whale oil cost more than the average worker's daily wage. The world was running out of light.

A few people had started experimenting with petroleum distillates, refining crude oil into something that could burn in a lamp. Canadian geologist Abraham Gesner had invented kerosene in eighteen forty six. A few small companies were collecting oil from seeps and shallow hand-dug pits and refining it into lamp fuel. But the supply was tiny, measured in barrels per week, not barrels per day. Nobody had figured out how to get large quantities of oil out of the ground.

A group of investors in New Haven, Connecticut, had an idea. They had formed a company, the Seneca Oil Company, and they had purchased land along Oil Creek in Pennsylvania. They knew there was oil down there. The question was how to reach it. They hired Edwin Drake, a retired railroad conductor who held the title of colonel, a mostly ceremonial rank from the state militia, and dispatched him to Titusville, population one hundred and twenty five, to figure it out.

Drake knew nothing about oil. His qualifications were that he was available, personable, and as I mentioned, he still had a free rail pass from his railroad days, which meant he could travel between New Haven and Titusville without costing the investors a penny in expenses. This is what started it all. Free train tickets.

When Drake arrived in Titusville in the spring of eighteen fifty eight, the locals thought he was insane. He walked around in a top hat. He called himself Colonel Drake. He announced that he intended to drill for oil the way people drilled for salt. Nobody had done that. Salt wells were common in the region, and salt miners occasionally hit oil by accident, which they considered a nuisance. The idea of drilling on purpose for oil, a substance nobody knew how to sell in quantity, struck everyone as absurd.

Drake hired salt well drillers. They began digging. It was slow, expensive work. The drillers kept quitting. They were used to drilling for something they understood. The hole kept collapsing because the ground was loose and wet. Drake solved this by driving an iron pipe down to bedrock before he began drilling inside it. He did not invent this technique, it was used in salt wells, but applying it to an oil well was novel and it solved the collapse problem.

By August, the investors in New Haven had lost patience. They sent a letter telling Drake to stop. The money was gone. There was no more. Come home.

The letter arrived on August twenty seventh, eighteen fifty nine. Drake had not yet read it. That morning, at sixty nine and a half feet, the drill struck a crevice. Oil began rising through the pipe.

The well was not spectacular by modern standards. It produced perhaps twenty barrels a day. But it was proof of concept. You could drill for oil, and it would flow out of the ground in quantities that made collection from surface seeps look like catching rainwater in a teacup.

When word got out, Titusville went insane. The population exploded. A barrel of oil that had sold for fifty cents was suddenly worth nothing because there was so much of it. Land that had been worth a few dollars an acre was suddenly being leased for thousands. Within fourteen months, there were seventy five wells operating along Oil Creek. The first oil boom had begun.

Drake himself did not get rich. He never patented his drilling method. He was a bad businessman. He lost his money in oil speculation, which is a deeply ironic way to go broke. He ended up living in poverty, and thirty years later, the state of Pennsylvania voted to give him a small pension so he would not die destitute. They put a statue of him in Titusville in nineteen oh two. There is a museum there now, the Drake Well Museum, built around a replica of his original derrick.

The cascading consequences of the Drake well are hard to overstate and also hard to compress into a few paragraphs, but I will try.

Within a few years, kerosene from petroleum had replaced whale oil as the standard lamp fuel. An entire global whaling industry, with ships and ports and rendering facilities and thousands of workers, vanished. Kerosene burned brighter and cost a fraction of the price. The last American whaling ship sailed in nineteen twenty one.

Then came the internal combustion engine. Gasoline was a byproduct of kerosene production, something refiners had to get rid of. They burned it off. In eighteen eighty five, Karl Benz built the first practical automobile powered by this waste product. By nineteen hundred, there were eight thousand cars in the United States. By nineteen twenty, there were eight million.

Then came plastics, synthetic rubber, asphalt for roads, petrochemical fertilizers that transformed agriculture, synthetic fabrics. All of it derived from the same substance Edwin Drake pulled from a sixty nine foot hole on August twenty seventh, eighteen fifty nine.

The deeper point is that the entire sequence was backward from what you would expect. We did not discover oil and then figure out what to do with it. We figured out what to do with it first, kerosene for lamps, and then went looking for it in bulk. And the guy who found it was not a scientist or an industrialist. He was a retired train conductor with a ceremonial colonel title and a free rail pass, sent to Pennsylvania by investors who had already given up on him by the time he succeeded.

The modern world runs on a substance that for most of human history was considered trash. It ruined wells, it smelled bad, it killed crops. Nobody knew what to do with it in quantity. And then one man drilled sixty nine feet into a hillside in Pennsylvania and pulled out enough of it to change everything. We are still living inside the cascade he started. Some revolutions begin with a speech or a battle. This one began with a free train ticket and a stubborn man in a top hat.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.