The exploration history of the U.S. offshore oil and natural gas industry began in the Pacific Ocean more than 100 years ago. As recently as 1947 no company had ever risked drilling beyond the sight of land.

America’s offshore petroleum industry began in the late 19th century in Pacific Ocean with drilling and production piers at Summerland, California. Drilling platforms also appreared on lakes in Ohio and Louisiana. By the 1940s, technology was taking wells far into the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1896, as enterprising businessmen pursued California’s prolific Summerland oilfield all the way to the beach, the lure of offshore production enticed Henry L. Williams and his associates to build a pier 300 feet out into the Pacific – and mount a standard cable-tool rig on it.

Although never built, Thomas Rowland’s 1869 design for an offshore platform was far ahead of its time.

By 1897 this first offshore well was producing oil and 22 companies soon joined in the boom, constructing 14 more piers and over 400 wells within the next five years. The Summerland offshore field produced for 25 years – fueling the growth of California’s economy.

Piers, Platforms and a Patent

In 1894, Henry Williams drilled two wells on a California beach. He drilled another in 1895 with encouraging results. This led Williams and others to exploring for oil offshore the next year.

They constructed piers and drilled wells, leading to the realization that the Summerland oilfield extended offshore. This would be the first offshore field developed in the nation by drilling offshore wells from piers. – From Santa Barbara County records

In 1911, Gulf Refining Co. abandoned the use of piers. It drilled Ferry Lake No. 1 on Caddo Lake, Louisiana, using a fleet of tugboats, barges, and floating pile drivers. When the well came in at 450 barrels per day, Gulf constructed platforms every 600 feet on each 10-acre lakebed site.

The  Caddo Lake wells – completed over water without a pier connection to shore – have frequently been called America’s first true offshore drilling . However, Ohio oil documents record hundreds of oil wells pumping far out into a lake – 20 years before drillers ventured into the waters of Caddo Lake.

Louisiana’s Caddo Lake, circa 1911.

As early as 1891, the first submerged oil wells were drilled from platforms built on piles in Grand Lake St. Marys in Ohio, notes historian Judith L. Sneed in “The First Over Water Drilling: The Lost History Of Ohio’s Grand Reservoir Oil Boom.” See “Ohio Offshore Wells.”

Even earlier, some historians say the true beginning of the modern offshore industry can be traced to an 1869 U.S. patent. Thomas Fitch Rowland of Greenpoint, New York, patented a “submarine drilling apparatus” on May 4, 1869.

Rowland’s design included a fixed, working platform for drilling offshore to a depth of almost 50 feet. The anchored, four-legged tower – with telescoping legs “suitable hydraulic attachments or devices” – resembles modern offshore platforms. Ream more in “An 1869 Offshore Rig Patent.”

Gulf of Mexico Technologies

In 1938, Pure Oil Co. and Superior Oil Co. built a freestanding drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico, despite logistics, engineering, and communications challenges.

They hired a Houston engineering and construction company, Brown & Root Marine Operators, Inc., to build a 320-foot by 180-foot freestanding wooden deck in 14-feet of water about a mile offshore. The chosen drilling site was near Creole, La.

Using onshore building criteria and intuition, the Creole platform was designed to withstand winds of 150 mph and constructed 15 feet above the water. Three hundred treated yellow pine pilings were driven 14 feet into the sandy bottom.

The Superior-Pure State No. 1 well was successful – but was wiped off its pilings by a hurricane in 1940. Although the pilings were damaged, the platform was quickly rebuilt and put back into production in the four million barrel field.

Onshore salt domes were recorded as early as 1890 by the Geological Survey of Texas.

“It may be tentatively assumed that the Gulf of Mexico is a potential source of salt-dome oil…Whether or not it will ever be economically feasible to explore these waters for the domes that must exist is a question for the future to answer.” – Geologist Orval Lester Brace in 1941.

Kerr-McGee dramatically answered the salt dome question in 1947 with an experimental offshore rig.

Not much equipment specifically designed for offshore drilling existed and exploration remained an extraordinarily speculative and risky business venture. An offshore dry hole could easily swallow the huge capital costs sunk into construction of a large, permanent rig platforms.

Nevertheless, Dean McGee of Kerr-McGee Oil Industries Inc. partnered with Phillips Petroleum and Stanolind Oil & Gas Co. to secure leases for exploratory wells in the Gulf of Mexico. They hired Brown & Root to build a freestanding platform 10 miles out to sea.

The Mighty Kermac No. 16

“We decided to explore the areas where the really potential prolific production might be – salt domes – the good ones on land were gone, but we could move out in the shallow water and, in effect, get into a virgin area where we could find the real class-one type salt dome prospect,” McGee said.

Vessels were needed to provide supplies, equipment, and crew quarters for the drilling site, 43 miles southwest of Morgan City, La. The gradually sloping Gulf of Mexico reached only about 18-feet deep at the drilling site. A second platform would be built about eight miles from the first at Ship Shoal Block 28. Sixteen 24-inch pilings were sunk 104 feet into the ocean floor to secure a 2,700 square foot wooden deck.

The Kermac No. 16 well stood in almost 20 feet of water, 10 miles at sea.

The well was spudded on Sept. 10, 1947. The biggest hurricane of the season arrived a week later – with winds of 140 mph. Kerr-McGee had $450,000 invested in the project. Both platforms were evacuated during the hurricane, but damage was minimal. Drilling promptly resumed. On Nov.14, the Kermac No. 16 well came in at 40 barrels per hour.

“Spectacular Gulf of Mexico Discovery. Possible 100-Million Barrel Field – 10 Miles at Sea,” proclaimed the Oil & Gas Journal. Kermac No.16 would produce 1.4 million barrels of oil and 307 million cubic feet of natural gas by 1984.

Early drillers focused on natural oil seeps – until a 1901 gusher at Spindletop, a salt dome in Beaumont, Texas. Seismic instruments revealed how salt moved up through the earth – sometimes leaving oil trapped.

New Records

By the end of 1949, 11 oil and natural gas fields were found in the Gulf of Mexico with 44 exploratory wells, according to the National Ocean Industries Association, which notes that the industry continued to through the 1950s.

Modern offshore energy industry benefits come from the hard lessons learned from 60 years of open water experience. Compared to the limits of just a few years ago, today’s achievements will no doubt pale in comparison to what the future of offshore exploration will bring.

Revenue generated from the production of oil became the second-largest revenue generator for the country, after income taxes. NOIA also notes:

As the industry entered the last decade of the 20th century, advancing technology ensued. New depth records for drilling reached 7,625 feet in the Gulf of Mexico, and Shell Oil’s platform ‘Troll,’ which stands in the North Sea in 1,000 feet of water, 1,500 feet high, became one of two man-made objects visible with the naked eye from the surface of the moon. The other is the Great Wall of China.

The first use of helicopters offshore was at the request of Kerr-McGee and Humble Oil. Bell Helicopters recognized the opportunity and formed Petroleum Bell Helicopters Co.

At right is a Bell Helicopter advertisement from 1954, courtesy the Ocean Star Offshore Drilling Rig and Museum

A flat area on an LST (from WW Two’s landing ship, tanks) anchored next to Humble Rig 28 served as landing pad for one of the first helicopters to be flown offshore.

Moveable rigs drill many exploratory offshore wells. Sometimes it is more economical to build a permanent platform from which well completion, extraction and production can occur. These large, permanent platforms are extremely expensive; they generally require large expected hydrocarbon deposits to be economical to construct.

This depiction of offshore drilling and completion platforms gives an idea of just how massive modern rigs can be. Because of their size, most permanent offshore rigs are constructed in pieces near land.

As components of the rig are completed, they are taken out to the drilling location. Sometimes construction or assembly can even take place as the rig is being transported to its intended destination, notes naturalgas.org.

Also see “Rigs to Reefs,“ “Deep Sea Roughnecks” and “Swimming Wrenches” (a history of remotely operated undersea vehicles).

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A “big fin” squid.

On November 11, 2007, a mile and a half underwater, a petroleum company’s remote control submersible camera captured a rarely seen Magnapinna squid.

The brief video, obtained by National Geographic News, shows the alien-like squid loiter above the seafloor in the Gulf of Mexico. The clip – from Shell Oil Company’s Perdido production site — marks the first sighting of a Magnapinna or “big fin” squid near oil development. Some marine biologists have now formed partnerships with petroleum companies.

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Offshore Oil and Gas Resources

Gulf of Mexico federal offshore oil production accounts for 23 percent of total U.S. crude oil production and federal offshore natural gas production in the Gulf accounts for 7 percent of total U.S. dry production, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Over 40 percent of total U.S. petroleum refining capacity is located along the Gulf coast, as well as 30 percent of total U.S. natural gas processing plant capacity.

To meet increasing U.S. demand while addressing environmental concerns, new technologies have resulted in drilling rigs capable of drilling 250 miles offshore to ocean depths exceeding 10,000 feet. At stake are an additional 19 billion barrels of oil and another 86 trillion cubic feet of gas. Fear of oil spills and heated environmental debates restrict access to many potential areas.

More than 5,000 offshore oil and natural gas platforms operate in the Gulf of Mexico around the clock, seven-days a week. It is the largest artificial reef system in the world.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, more than 60 percent of all oil found in seawater is not from wells, but from natural seepage (the largest emitting 1,000 barrels of oil a week); 32 percent comes from shipping and run-off from land. Four percent can be attributed to tanker spills.

However, near Santa Barbara, Calif., offshore drilling’s worst environmental disaster occurred in 1969 when an undersea well blew out. The calamity quickly brought industry changes that have protected the offshore environment ever since.

Between 1980 and 1999, about 7.4 billion barrels of oil were produced in federal waters, says the U.S. Coast Guard. Less than a thousandth of one percent spilled – less than the natural seepage of oil from the sea floor.

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Geology in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, marks the spot where on April 15, 1897, a large crowd gathered at Nellie Johnstone No. 1 to watch as as a “go devil” was used to “shoot” the well – a downhole nitroglycerin explosion to maximize production – before it was completed.

Prior to the Civil War, America’s search for oil prompted entrepreneurs, speculators, and wildcatters to seek their fortunes on the great plains of the Indian Territory.

This was land reserved for Native Americans by Congress and home to its indigenous people as well as the “Five Civilized Tribes” – Choctaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, and Chickasaw, which had been relocated from the Southeast.

Today, Oklahoma ranks 7th in U.S. oil production and 4th in natural gas. George B. Keeler and William Johnstone are remembered as the Indian Territory entrepreneurs who opened an Oklahoma oil boom that continues to this day.

Each of the Five Civilized Tribes established national territorial boundaries, constitutional governments, and advanced judicial and public school systems. The Indian Territory included present-day Oklahoma north and east of the Red River, as well as Kansas and Nebraska.

Discovering Indian Territory Oil

By 1856, fifty-one years before Oklahoma statehood, the Indian Territory had become home to the Five Civilized Tribes – as well as the Osage, Pawnee, Seneca, Shawnee, Delaware, and others.

A non-tribal member coming into the Indian Territory to work was required to take out a license or permit; one who married into a tribe was adopted and able to share in tribal property.

In 1859, Lewis Ross, a brother of Chief John Ross of the Cherokees, found a pocket of oil that produced about ten barrels a day for nearly a year. He was drilling for saltwater – brine being  much-desired for making salt, a food preservative.

Ross drilled his well on the Grand River near Salina in what is now Mayes County, Oklahoma. After deciding to sink a deeper well for greater production, he found oil instead. News spread of this potential source of tribal revenue.

Spectators watched as Miss Jenni Cass, dropped a weighted percussion device (often called a go devil) down the well bore to set off a waiting canister of nitroglycerin – producing a gusher that heralded the beginning of Oklahoma’s oil era.

According to the constitutions of the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations at that time, the land was held in common by the Indian citizens of the nations – but the individual citizens could lease out a limited amount of land.

The Ross well was quickly depleted, but it proved that there was oil to be found in the Indian Territory.

By 1875, Jacob H. Bartles, another pioneer and adopted Delaware Indian, was operating a trading post on the Caney River in the Cherokee Nation.

Bartles employed two ambitious young men, George B. Keeler and William Johnstone. They too were adopted members of the Osage and Delaware tribes, respectively.

Within a few years, Keeler and Johnstone started their own competing general store on the other side of the Caney River, in what became Bartlesville. It was a successful enterprise and while the partners knew of oil seeps in the area at this time, they lacked the financial support and tribal permissions necessary to pursue the opportunity.

More than 20 years later, Keeler and Johnstone would make oil history just around the river bend from their general store.

The Search for Rock Oil

In 1884, the Cherokee Nation passed a law authorizing the “Organization of a company for the purpose of finding petroleum, or rock oil, and thus increasing the revenue of the Cherokee Nation.”

Five years later, a wildcatter named Edward Byrd secured mineral leases from the Cherokee Nation. He drilled his first well near present-day Chelsea (Rogers County) in 1890, and found oil at a depth of only 36 feet. His well produced about a half a barrel a day but his efforts were hampered severely by government regulation, inadequate transportation facilities and the lack of a readily accessible market.

Edward Byrd organized the U.S. Oil and Gas Company, and sold one half of his acreage to the Cherokee Oil and Gas Company. His Chelsea well is still celebrated as Oklahoma’s first.

A re-enactment of the dramatic moment that changed Oklahoma history highlighted the 2008 dedication of a 84-foot replica derrick at Discovery 1 Park in Bartlesville. The derrick replaced one dedicated in 1948.

Following Edward Byrd’s success, Kansas oilmen James Guffey and John H. Galey approached several prominent Indian citizens, including general store partners Keeler and Johnstone, and offered to purchase mineral sub-leases and pay a royalty of three and one-half percent to the Cherokee Nation on any petroleum production.

Years later George B. Keeler recalled, “Guffey and Galey of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, were drilling at Neodesha, Kansas, in 1893. Mr. Galey got in his buggy and followed the mounds from Kansas to the mound at Bartlesville.

“He came to my store on the present site of Bartlesville and told me that there was oil here and that if I would get a lease from the Cherokees, he would drill a well. Mr. Galey said that he knew there was oil here because of the mounds which, in his opinion, had been thrown up by gas pressure; and he called attention to the broken edges of all the rocks which, he said, would be round if caused by water and erosion.”

However, before the deal could be completed, Guffey and Galey withdrew their backing and moved on to a new project near Beaumont, Texas. There, in 1901, they would bring in the famous well, “Spindletop.”

Nellie Johnstone No.1

Meanwhile, George Keeler, William Johnstone, Frank Overlees, their Indian wives, and other locals had acquired mineral leases on over 200,000 acres of Cherokee land. They ultimately secured new financial backing from the millionaire Chicago meat-packer Michael Cudahy’s “Cudahy Oil Company.”

The new venture’s search for oil began in earnest when they hired the well-known firm of “McBride and Bloom” from Independence, Kansas. Albert P. McBride and Camden L. Bloom had drilled Kansas’ first commercially successful well, Norman No.1, in what would come to be known as the Mid-Continent Field, before they ranged into the Indian Territory.

In December 1896, McBride and Bloom abandoned a 1,750 foot dry hole near Red Fork (today part of Tulsa) to drill a new well for Cudahy Oil Co. It took three-weeks of hauling equipment, tools, pipe and other materials 70-miles northward across the freezing Arkansas River to the new Keeler and Johnstone site on Spencer Creek of the Caney River.

Drilling began in January 1897, the same month that Bartlesville was incorporated with a population of about 200 people. Four months later, at 1,320 feet, the Nellie Johnstone No.1 well (named for partner William Johnstone’s six year-old daughter), showed for oil.

A downtown Oklahoma City parade celebrating the 2007 centennial of Oklahoma statehood included a float acknowledging Oklahoma’s petroleum heritage, seen here in an artist’s early conception.

“Shooting” had been used since the 1859 Drake well in Pennsylvania to stimulate production, so G. M. Perry, an expert shooter, was brought in. Perry had been McBride and Bloom’s shooter for the successful Norman No.1 well in Kansas.

Liquid nitroglycerin was poured into a metal canister – or “torpedo” – and lowered into the well on April 15, 1897, as a crowd of about 50 curious onlookers gathered. At 3 p.m., George Keeler’s stepdaughter, Miss Jenni Cass, dropped the “go devil” detonating device down the well bore to set off the waiting nitroglycerin.

The explosion caused Nellie Johnstone No.1 to blow in as a gusher, producing from 50 to 75 barrels of oil a day. Despite the production, the Cudahy Oil Co. was confronted with the same problem Edward Byrd had faced seven years earlier: more crude oil than the local market could consume.

With no storage tanks, pipelines, or railroads available, the Nellie Johnstone No. 1 was capped for two years.

Another chapter in Bartlesville’s rich petroleum history is exhibited at the Phillips Petroleum Company Museum, which opened May 12, 2007.

The railroad finally came to Bartlesville with the opening of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe in 1899. Oil could then be shipped from Bartlesville to Caney, Kansas, and from there by pipeline to a small Standard Oil refinery in Neodesha for processing into kerosene and other products.

With the railroad and pipeline, the Nellie Johnstone No.1, became commercially profitable in May 1900 with the initial shipment of oil at a price of $1.25 per barrel, less 25 cents for handling.

As the discovery well for the giant Bartlesville-Dewey Field, the Nellie Johnstone No.1 ushered in the oil era for Oklahoma Territory. It produced more than 100,000 barrels of oil in its lifetime. In the ten years following the Nellie Johnstone discovery, Bartlesville’s population grew from 200 to over 4,000 while Oklahoma’s oil production grew from 1,000 barrels to over 43 million barrels annually.

At the age of 12, future oil giant J. Paul Getty started selling the “Saturday Evening Post” in Bartlesville. By the age of 23, he had earned his first million in oil. Frank Phillips, perhaps most beloved of all the Bartlesville oil legends, established the international Phillips Petroleum Company, which remained in Bartlesville until merging with Conoco in 2003.

After the Nellie Johnstone success, production in the Indian Territory rose rapidly, adding much impetus towards the granting of Statehood in 1907. In the 10 years between the Nellie Johnstone and Statehood, Oklahoma became the largest oil-producing entity in the world.

Today, Oklahoma still ranks 7th in United States’ oil production and 4th in natural gas. George B. Keeler and William Johnstone are remembered as the Indian Territory entrepreneurs who opened an Oklahoma oil boom that continues to this day. Oklahoma’s first commercial oil well is commemorated north of downtown Bartlesville on Cherokee Avenue, where a rebuilt replica of the Nellie Johnstone No.1, stands at the original site.

The 1948 presentation of the well to the city of Bartlesville appropriately noted, “Like the rush for Oklahoma land, the discovery of oil attracted both men and capital from far and near, these pioneers in petroleum development were as rugged and self-sufficient as those who settled the land … Oklahoma’s two greatest industries, agriculture and petroleum, have developed largely hand in hand, and back of both developments are the pioneers, men of restless energy and unbounded faith.”

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Editor’s Note – According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Oklahoma continues to be a leading natural gas producing state with more than a dozen of the 100 largest natural gas fields in the country; Oklahoma has five petroleum refineries with a combined capacity of roughly three percent of the total U.S. distillation capacity.

Please support the American Oil & Gas Historical Society with a donation.

Outside the Page Museum of Los Angeles, life-size replicas of several extinct mammals are featured at the Rancho La Brea in Hancock Park. Although commonly called the “tar pits,” the pools are actually comprised of asphalt.

The La Brea “tar pits,” discovered on August 3, 1769, by Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola, exemplify the many natural petroleum seeps of southern California.

“We proceeded for three hours on a good road; to the right were extensive swamps of bitumen which is called chapapote,” Franciscan friar Juan Crespi noted in a diary of the expedition. “We debated whether this substance, which flows melted from underneath the earth, could occasion so many earthquakes.” Read the rest of this entry »

January 21, 1865 - Civil War Veteran tests an Oil Well “Torpedo”

A Pennsylvania historical marker commemorates Colonel E.A.L. Roberts, a Civil War veteran who patented “torpedoes” – iron canisters filled with gunpowder (later nitroglycerin) that were lowered into wells and ignited by a weight dropped along a suspension wire onto a percussion cap.

Civil War veteran Col. Edward A. L. Roberts (1829-1881) conducts his first experiment to increase oil production by using an explosive charge deep in the well.

Roberts twice detonates eight pounds of black powder 465 feet deep in the bore of the Ladies Well on Watson’s Flats south of Titusville, Pennsylvania.

The “shooting” of the well increases daily production from a few barrels to more than 40 barrels. In 1866, the Titusville Morning Herald will report:

Our attention has been called to a series of experiments that have been made in the wells of various localities by Col. Roberts, with his newly patented torpedo.

The results have in many cases been astonishing. The torpedo, which is an iron case, containing an amount of powder varying from 15 pounds to 20 pounds, is lowered into the well, down to the spot, as near as can be ascertained, where it is necessary to explode it. It is then exploded by means of a cap on the torpedo, connected with the top of the shell by a wire. Read the rest of this entry »

Oil scouts like Justus McMullen often braved harsh winters (and sometimes armed guards) to visit well sites. Their intelligence debunked rumors and “demystified” reports about oil wells producing in early oil fields.

In the hard winter of 1888, famed 37-year-old “oil scout” Justus C. McMullen, succumbs to pneumonia – contracted while scouting production data from the Pittsburgh Manufacturers’ Gas Company’s well at Cannonsburg.

McMullen, publisher of the Bradford, Pennsylvania, “Petroleum Age” newspaper, already had contributed much to America’s early petroleum industry as a reliable the oil field detective. Read the rest of this entry »

Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum, operated by Lamar University in Beaumont, is a 15-building complex, which re-creates Gladys City, an early 1900s era boomtown on the historic Spindletop oil field. The museum provides services to the public, including school tours, adult group tours, teachers’ workshops – and gusher re-enactments.

The Beaumont, Texas, museum includes 15 buildings of exhibits to educate visitors.

On January 1, 1901, if you asked residents of Beaumont, Texas, what news interested them, they would have said the Galveston Hurricane of September 8 (the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history), or the dawning of a new century.

However, as a southeastern Texas petroleum museum explains, if you asked them after January 10, 1901 – they would have said the great oil gusher on Spindletop Hill.

The Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum in Beaumont tells the story of the Spindletop well, a discovery that created the greatest oil boom in America – exceeding the nation’s first oil discovery well in 1859 in Pennsylvania.

Just as consumer demand for kerosene for lamps was declining in favor of electricity, Americans would soon want far more of another refined petroleum product: gasoline. Within a few decades, new oil companies will pump gasoline into automobiles from “filling stations” across the country.

Once a popular view in Beaumont’s Dixie Hotel: “Spindletop Viewing Her Gusher,” 1903, pastel on linen, by Aaron Arion.

According to museum Curator Christy Marino, Texaco and Gulf got their start in the Beaumont area oilfields. Humble (now ExxonMobil) began at the at the nearby town of Humble.

Also known as the “Lucas Gusher” after Captain Anthony F. Lucas, a mining engineer who drilled on a hill, the oilfield produced 3.59 million barrels in its first year and an incredible 17.4 million barrels the next.

The discovery near the southeastern Texas Gulf Coast defied predictions of other earth scientists.

As a result of Spindletop, “Christmas trees” to control oil wells became commonplace in the industry. The Texas discovery “changed the way people would live all over the world,” proclaimed Houston oilman Michel T. Halbouty in 1952. “It revived the industrial revolution…caused the United States to become a world power…(and) revolutionized transportation through the automobile industry.”

Texas oil production also would help bring an end to John D. Rockefeller’s oil monopolies. In 1936 – fifteen years after Lucas died – the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers (founded in 1871) began awarding its Anthony F. Lucas Medal to recognize “distinguished achievements in improving the technique and practice of finding and producing petroleum.”

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Spindletop creates the modern oil and natural gas industry, changes the future of American industry and transportation – and brings many new oilfield technologies.

The discovery well’s story – which popularizes rotary drilling technology – begins more than a decade earlier when the Gladys City Oil, Gas & Manufacturing Company is formed by Patillo Higgins. Higgins, a one-armed mechanic and self-taught geologist, is one of the few at the time who believes U.S. industries will soon switch fuels from coal to oil.

The Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum in Beaumont, Texas, tells the story of one of America’s greatest petroleum discoveries, the “Lucas Gusher” of January 10, 1901. The Spindletop field will produce more oil in one day than the rest of the world’s oilfields combined.

Higgins is convinced that the “Big Hill” four miles south of Beaumont has oil — despite conventional wisdom to the contrary. Through the latter half of the 19th century, Pennsylvania had been the most oil-productive state in the country, notes an article by the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI). Texas had produced only minor amounts of oil, starting with a well in 1866 drilled by Lyne T. Barret near the East Texas town of Nacogdoches.

Patillo Higgins forms the Gladys City Oil, Gas & Manufacturing Company on August 24, 1892.

Formed over millions of years, the hill near Beaumont is the result of a giant underground dome of salt that moved towards the surface, explains the article. Higgins had a feeling that drilling a well on top of this salt dome would produce oil.

“The Texas press, as well as the local geologists, had been very skeptical of Higgins for years, and no one in the area believed that a salt dome structure could produce oil,” the article says.

The Gladys City Oil, Gas & Manufacturing Company drills wells on Spindletop in 1893, 1895 and 1896. All are dry holes.

Higgins, who will leave the venture, hires a Croatian mining engineer. Anthony Lucas (Antun Lucic, born in 1855). Lucas has studied at the Polytechnic Institute in Graz, Austria, and served as a captain in the Austrian navy. He recently has been a salt miner in Louisiana.

Capt. Anthony Lucas, a Croatian mining engineer and former officer in the Austrian navy.

I  went to Beaumont, Texas, about seventy miles west of Lafayette. There I was attracted by an elevation, then known locally as Big Hill, although this hill amounted merely to a mound rising only twelve feet above the level of the prairie.

This mound attracted my attention on account of its contour, which indicated possibilities for an incipient dome below, and because at the apex of it there were exudations of sulphuretted hydrogen gas. — Capt. Lucas quote from an article by Adam S. Eterovich.

Lucas contacts famed Pennsylvania oilman John Galey and his partner James Guffey, who had drilled marginally successful wells in nearby Corsicana in 1896. Galey and Guffey had returned to Pennsylvania, convinced that there was little future in Texas oil.

“Lucas turned to Guffey and Galey, who had left the area three years earlier,” the PRI article continues. “Something made them change their minds, and in 1900, John Galey returned to Beaumont, Texas, to survey the area. He picked the spot, and the drilling began on October 27, 1900.”

Technological advances from drilling at Spindletop “paved the way for other oil producing states like California to increase their production.” Early major oil companies like Texaco, Gulf, Mobile, Humble and Sun Oil trace their roots to the “Big Hill.”

Drilling is difficult at first. “There is little in the way of rock at the surface in that part of the world. Instead, oil wildcatters had to drill through several hundred feet of sand,” the article notes. “This made the hole prone to cave in on them. To help solve this problem, one of Lucas’s drillers, Curt Hamill, came up with a solution that was revolutionary at the time.”

Instead of pumping water down the hole to flush out the cuttings produced by the action of the drill, Hamill used mud. “This proved to help not only in retrieving the cuttings, but just as importantly, it was found that the mud stuck to the sides of the hole and kept it from caving in, explains the PRI article. “It was found there were even more benefits, and mud has been used in almost every drill hole around the world ever since.”

“On this spot on the tenth day of the twentieth century a new era in civilization began,” notes an inscription on the 25-foot-tall monument erected in 1941 — and today part of the Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum’s outdoor exhibits.

The “Lucas Gusher” will erupt more than 150 feet into the air. It begins flowing at an astounding 100,000 barrels per day from a depth of 1,010 feet. I

This is the first discovery of the prolific salt dome structures along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The well is not brought under control for nine days, losing an estimated 850,000 barrels of oil. According to PRI, a new device – now called a “Christmas Tree” – is invented on the spot to control the flow of oil.

The Spindletop field will soon produce more oil in one day than all the rest of the world’s oilfields combined. In its first year alone Spindletop produced 3.59 million barrels of oil — climbing to 17.4 million by its second year. The huge amount of oil causes the price of oil to drop from $2 to less than 25 cents a barrel. Texaco, Gulf, Mobile, Humble and Sun oil companies can trace their roots to the Big Hill.

“Technological advances engineered in Texas during this early period paved the way for other oil producing states like California to increase their production,” concludes Vintage Oil, a website that sells photographs.

“Fishtail drilling bits gave way to the Hughes Tool rotary rock bit.” the site adds. “The movers and shakers of the oil industry converged on Houston in the early 1900s and the city still reigns today as the energy capital of the world.”

The Spindletop discovery “affected the entire world,” proclaims Michel T. Halbouty, a legendary Houston oilman who co-authored the 1952 book Spindletop: the True Story of the Oil Discovery That Changed the World.

“It changed the way people would live all over the world,” Halbouty explains. “It revived the industrial revolution, which had been dead for a while. It caused the United States to become a world power. It revolutionized transportation through the automobile industry. It started the Liquid Fuel Age, the greatest age in the history of the world.”

Two Beaumont museums tell the story of the Spindletop discovery — and today’s role of the petroleum industry in America’s economic development. Visit the Texas Energy Museum and the Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum — where educational water-gusher demonstrations occur.

Read about salt domes in “Offshore Oil History.” Learn more about Texas exploration history in “First Lone Star Discovery.”

Please support the American Oil & Gas Historical Society with a donation.

With a collection of more than three million artifacts, the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., today exhibits surprisingly few relating to America’s petroleum exploration and production industry. It wasn’t always so.

Tulsa will recover the forgotten “Panorama of Petroleum” mural – thanks to the city’s Gilcrease Museum. In 1998, the mural is restored and installed at the Tulsa International Airport, where it remains today.

In June 1967, a massive “Hall of Petroleum” opened at the Smithsonian Institution’s museum on the national mall. The exhibit featured many exploration and production technological advancements – and the resulting onshore and offshore discoveries considered essential to development of U.S. energy resources. Read the rest of this entry »

December 31, 1954 - Ohio Company sets Depth Record in California

The West Kern Oil Museum in Taft – where a statue was dedicated in 2011 – educates visitors about California’s energy industry.

As drilling technology continues to advance, a new record depth of 21,482 feet is reached by an Ohio Oil Company exploratory well about 17 miles southwest of Bakersfield, Kern County, California, in the San Joaquin Valley.

The Ohio Oil Company (today’s Marathon Oil Corporation) sets a world-record with its No. 1 KCL-A-72-4. The well is a dry hole.

Deep-drilling technologies will advance in coming decades. In 1974 – after 504 days of drilling – the No. 1 Bertha Rogers reaches total depth of 31,441 feet in Oklahoma’s Anadarko basin. The well hits molten sulfur and is abandoned.

Visit the West Kern Oil Museum and the “Black Gold: The Oil Experience” exhibit at the Kern County Museum.

January 2, 1866 – Early Rotary Drilling Patent

An “Improvement in Rock Drills” patent is filed that for the first time includes the basic elements of modern rotary rigs and notes that its “peculiar construction is particularly adapted for boring deep wells.” Read the rest of this entry »

December 4, 1928 – First Oil Discovery using Reflection Seismography 

A monument in Seminole, Oklahoma, commemorates the December 4, 1928, birth of reflection seismography, a vital petroleum exploration technology.

A new and revolutionary oil field technology is applied for the first time near Seminole, Oklahoma.

Amerada Petroleum Corporation drills into the Viola limestone formation to bring in the first oil well from a geological structure identified by reflection seismography.

This seismic survey, executed by Amerada Petroleum’s subsidiary Geophysical Research, uses technology that evolved from the early seismic experiments of Reginald Fessenden, Ludger Mintrop – and renowned Oklahoma physicist John C. Karcher. Read the rest of this entry »

Since 1896, when the first commercial oil well was drilled in Bartlesville, many historic Oklahoma oilfields have been discovered: Glennpool, Cushing, Three Sands, Healdton, Oklahoma City and others – including 20 “giants.” Few have had the tremendous economic impact as the late 1920s oilfields of the greater Seminole area. 

Prosperity brought traffic jams to Seminole, Oklahoma, in the mid-1920s when newly discovered oilfields “swung the United States’ oil inventory from scarcity to surplus.” Photo courtesy the Oklahoma Oil Museum.

A July 16, 1926, discovery well near Seminole, Oklahoma, revealed the massive potential of an oil producing formation, the Wilcox sand –  and launched a drilling boom that will make Oklahoma one of today’s leading producing states. The Fixico No. 1 well penetrated the Wilcox sand at 4,073 feet.

By 1935, the oilfields around Seminole became the largest supplier of oil in the world. More than 60 petroleum reservoirs were found in 1,300 square miles of east-central Oklahoma – and six were “giants,” producing more than million barrels of oil each. Read the rest of this entry »

A wildcat well comes in on S. L. Fowler’s farm near a small North Texas community on July 29, 1918. The subsequent drilling boom along the Red River will make Burkburnett famous – two decades before “Boom Town,” the 1940 motion picture it inspires.

“Burkburnett was a sleepy farm town that transformed into a ‘Boom Town’ as a result of the North Texas oil boom in 1918,” explains the Burkburnett Historical Society. A popular 1940 MGM movie results from an article in Cosmopolitan magazine.

At the time of the Fowler No. 1 well’s discovery, future moviestar Clark Gable is a teenage roustabout in an Oklahoma oilfield. The well is completed at the northeastern edge of Burkburnett, founded in 1907 — and named by President Theodore Roosevelt, who two years earlier hunted wolf along the Red River with rancher Burk Burnett. Read the rest of this entry »

With exhibits collected over five decades by Francis “F.T.” Sr., the Felty Outdoor Oil Museum of Burkburnett, Texas, displays machinery from the height of a 1918 North Texas oil boom. Portable cable-tool spudders are watched over by museum founder’s son, F.T. Felty, Jr., an independent oil and gas producer.

Francis “F.T.” Felty Jr., stands by a photograph of himself — playing on one of his father’s drilling rigs.

Three generations of the Felty family have kicked historic Burkburnett oil field mud from their boots.

The first, Francis “F.T.” Felty Sr., worked in Wichita County through the revival of a North Texas drilling boom during World War Two. Responding to the war’s steel shortages, he crisscrossed the oil patch in a truck – pulling used casings. It turned into a long career in the oil patch.

When the senior Felty moved from salvaging and began drilling in the 1970s, it was within sight of the historic 1918 Burkburnett discovery well. He had begun collecting old oil field equipment in the 1950s – and a lot of rocks, says his son, Francis “F.T.” Felty Jr., the owner of the F.T. Felty Operating Company Read the rest of this entry »

In 1958, the University of Texas Board of Regents moved the Santa Rita No. 1 well’s walking beam and other equipment to the Austin campus. After the dedication, the student newspaper described the well “as one that made the difference between pine-shack classrooms and modern buildings.”

The vast Permian Basin, once known as a “petroleum graveyard,” has been producing since 1923. The discovery well, Santa Rita No. 1, brought wildcatters who followed it from most of West Texas into the southeastern corner of New Mexico.

Near Big Lake, Texas – on arid land leased from the University of Texas – Texon Oil and Land Company struck oil on May 28, 1923, after 21 months of cable-tool drilling that averaged less than five feet a day. Read the rest of this entry »

Building a community oil museum is not for the faint of heart.

“Money and volunteers, volunteers and money,” are the biggest challenges, according to John Larrabee, board president for the Illinois Oil Field Museum and Resource Center on the outskirts of his hometown of Oblong, Illinois.

The Illinois Oil Field Museum is located in Oblong, Illinois, on Highway 33, southeast of Effingham. First opened in 1961, the community museum moved into a new building in 2001 and today continues to add new exhibits.

“The first thing you have to have is a goal and the determination to keep at it, no matter what. Don’t give up, whatever happens,” Larrabee explained in a 2004 interview with historical society Contributing Editor Kris Wells.

It helps to know something about the oil business, said the third generation Illinois Basin oilman. “The museum began way back in 1961 with a fellow named Enos Bloom, Larrabee noted. “In those days, the city of Oblong provided and maintained a building that housed donated artifacts.” Read the rest of this entry »

March 5, 1963 – Petroleum Product receives Patent

Arthur Melin receives a U.S. Patent (No. 3,079,728) for a “Hoop Toy.”

Oil Creek Plastics of Titusville, Pennsylvania, celebrates the 150th anniversary of the U.S. petroleum industry during a 2009 parade.

The Wham-O Company, founded in 1948 by Melin and partner Richard Knerr, previously trademarked the name “Hula Hoop.”

The California company began using Marlex, a new plastic from Phillips Petroleum Company of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, to manufacture its first hoop in 1958.

An estimated 20 million Hula Hoops are sold in six months.

Although Phillips Petroleum introduced Marlex polyethylene in 1954, there was little demand until orders came from the toy company that began by making wooden slingshots. In 1957 Wham-O added a plastic flying disc, the “Pluto Platter” – today’s Frisbee – to its products. The next year, the Marlex-made Hula Hoop was introduced, launching a national craze. Read the rest of this entry »

February 20, 1959 – First LNG Tanker arrives in England

After a three-week voyage, the Methane Pioneer – the world’s first liquefied natural gas tanker – arrives at the world’s first LNG terminal at Canvey Island, England, from Lake Charles, Louisiana.

The world’s first liquefied natural gas tanker is a converted World War II liberty freighter.

The vessel, a converted World War II liberty freighter, contains five, 7,000-barrel aluminum tanks supported by balsa wood and insulated with plywood and urethane, according to the Center for Energy Economics (CEE).

“This event demonstrated that large quantities of liquefied natural gas could be transported safely across the ocean,” notes CEE, a research arm of the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas.

The 340-foot Methane Pioneer, owned by the Comstock Liquid Methane Corporation, refrigerates its cargo to minus 285 degrees Fahrenheit. When vaporized, the LNG expands by the ratio of 600 to one.

“German engineer Karl Von Linde built the first practical compressor refrigeration machine in Munich in 1873,” CEE explains. “The first LNG plant was built in West Virginia in 1912 and began operation in 1917. The first commercial liquefaction plant was built in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1941.” Read the rest of this entry »