The petroleum industry supplies America with an amazing variety of products that are often “hiding in plain sight.” For Binney & Smith Company, common oilfield paraffin changed the company’s destiny by coloring children’s imaginations.

Dustless chalk circa 1904.

Although they longed for color, students in Alice Stead Binney’s classroom had to settle for dustless chalk. An-Du-Septic dustless chalk was so popular among turn-of-the-century teachers that it won a Gold Medal at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

Teachers like Alice loved the tidy new product, but their choices were limited. Pencils of the day were primitive, with square “leads” made from a variety of clays, slates, and graphite.

Color writing implements were the toxic and expensive imports of artists, best kept away from schoolchildren.

Alice’s husband Edwin, and his cousin, C. Harold Smith, created the award-winning An-Du-Septic chalk as a consequence of expanding their pigment business into the sideline production of slate pencils for schools. Read the rest of this entry »

Brothers Amos and James Densmore designed and fabricated the first successful railroad tank cars used in the Pennsylvania oilfields in 1865. Patented a year later and built by the thousands, their invention greatly improved the bulk transportation of oil. Photo courtesy the Drake Well Museum.

The Densmore Railroad Tank Car will briefly revolutionize the bulk transportation of crude oil to market.

Railroad oil tank cars became the latest of a growing number of oilfield innovations when two brothers received a U.S. patent on April 10, 1866.

James and Amos Densmore of Meadville, Pennsylvania, were granted the patent for their “Improved Car for Transporting Petroleum,” which they developed one year earlier in the booming oil region of Northwestern Pennsylvania.

Using an Atlantic & Great Western Railroad flatcar, the brothers secured two tanks in order to ship oil in bulk. Patent No. 53,794 describes and illustrates the railroad car’s design.

The nature of our invention consists in combining two large, light tanks of iron or wood or other material with the platform of a common railway flat freight-car, making them practically part of the car, so as they carry the desired substance in bulk instead of in barrels, casks, or other vessels or packages, as is now universally done on railway cars.

The brothers described the use of special bolts at the top and bottom of the tanks to act as a braces and “to prevent any shock or jar to the tank from the swaying of the car while in motion.” 

An historical marker on U.S. 8 south of Titusville memorializes the Densmore brothers’ contribution to petroleum transportation technology.

The first functional railway oil tank car was invented and constructed in 1865 by James and Amos Densmore at nearby Miller Farm along Oil Creek. It consisted of two wooden tanks placed on a flat railway car; each tank held 40-45 barrels of crude oil. A successful test shipment was sent in September 1865 to New York City. By 1866, hundreds of tank cars were in use. The Densmore Tank Car revolutionized the bulk transportation of crude oil to market.

Safer and stronger, riveted-iron horizontal tanks will soon replace Densmore tanks.

According to an ExplorePAhistory.com article, the benefit of such cars to the oil industry was immense – it cost $170 less to ship eighty barrels of oil from Titusville to New York in a tank car than in individual barrels. But the Densmore cars had flaws.

They were unstable, top-heavy, prone to leaks, and limited in capacity by the eight-foot width of the flatcar. Within a year, oil haulers shifted from the Densmore vertical vats to larger, horizontal riveted iron cylindrical tanks, which also demonstrated greater structural integrity during derailments or collisions.

The same basic design for transporting petroleum is still used today as railroads have put  dozens of other products – from corn syrup to chemicals – in the versatile tank car.

Although the Densmore brothers left the oil region by 1867 – their inventiveness was far from over.

The Densmore brothers invent one of the first typewriters.

In 1875, Amos assisted Christopher L. Sholes to rearrange the “type writing machine” keyboard – so that commonly used letters no longer collided and got stuck. The “QWERTY” arrangement vastly improved Shole’s original 1868 invention.

Following his brother’s work with Sholes, inventor of the first practical typewriter, James Densmore’s oilfield financial success helped the brothers establish the Densmore Typewriter Company, which produced its first model in 1891.

The ExplorePAhistory.com article concludes: Biographies of the Densmores – and even their personal papers now residing at the Milwaukee Public Museum – all refer to their work on typewriters, but make no mention of their pioneering work in railroad tank car design.

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A failed oilman turns into an assassin?

John Wilkes Booth’s dreams of Pennsylvania oil wealth end in July 1864. Attempting to increase their oil well’s production, Booth and his partners instead “utterly ruined the hole and the well never yielded another drop.”

In January 1864, John Wilkes Booth made his first of several trips to Franklin, Pennsylvania, where he purchased an oil lease on the Fuller farm.

Maps of the day reveal the three-acre strip of land on the farm, about one mile south of Franklin and on the east side of the Allegheny River. A small marker can be found at the site where he drilled an oil well.

The Actor and Investor

The 1863 theater season had brought a handsome, 24-year-old aspiring actor the fame he had long pursued. For years, he had struggled in the shadows of his renowned thespian father, Junius, and brothers, Edwin and Junius, Jr.

Booth had opened his stage career in 1855 at the Charles Street Theatre in Baltimore and became a member of the Richmond Theatre in 1858. Unlike the rest of his family, he would become a Confederate sympathizer as audiences in Richmond adopted him as one of their own. They loved the energy he brought to his Shakespearean performances – his sword fights and dangerous leaps from balconies. 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 »

The Oil City, Pennsylvania, Oil Exchange incorporated in 1874. In 1877, it was the third largest financial exchange of any kind in America, behind New York and San Francisco.

In a sign of the growing  power of John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil Company brings an end to Pennsylvania’s highly speculative oil trading markets.

On January 23, 1895, the Standard Oil purchasing agency in Oil City notifies independent oil producers it will only buy their oil at a price “as high as the markets of the world will justify” – and not necessarily “the price bid on the oil exchange for certificate oil.” 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 »

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 17, 1884 –  Fighting Oil Field Fires with Cannons

Especially in the Great Plains, frequent lightening strikes caused oil tank fires. This rare photograph is from the collection of the Kansas Oil Museum in El Dorado.

“Oil Fires, like Battles, are fought by Artillery” is the catchy phrase in a New England magazine.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology publishes its firsthand account of the problem of lightning strikes in America’s growing number of oil fields – and the technology used to extinguish burning oil tanks. MIT not only reports on the fiery results of an oil field lightning strike, but also the practice of using artillery to fight such conflagrations.

A park in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, includes an “oil patch cannon.”

“A Thunder-Storm in the Oil Country” explains that “it is usually desirable to let (oil) out of the tank to burn on the ground in thin layers; so small cannon throwing a three inch solid shot are kept at various stations throughout the region for this purpose.”

Today, several oil patch community museums have a cannon on exhibit to educate visitors about this early firefighting technology, especially in the Great Plains, where frequent lightening strikes caused oil tank fires. Oil patch museums in Seminole and Bartlesville, Oklahoma, include cannons to educate visitors about this early fire-fighting technology. Read more in “Oil Field Artillery.” Read the rest of this entry »

Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler has the greatest number of panoramic or “Birds-Eye View” maps in the collection of the Library of Congress. Lithographs of his cartography (done without a balloon) fascinated the public of America’s Victorian Age.

More than 400 Thaddeus Fowler panoramas have been identified. There are 324 in the Library of Congress, including Oil City, Pennsylvania. Source: Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C.

Panoramic maps were a popular cartographic form used to depict U.S. towns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Interestingly, many of what Fowler called “aero views” captured the small cities near America’s earliest oil and natural gas fields.

T.M. Fowler published this Titusville, Pennsylvania, panorama in 1896. An oil discovery along the banks of Oil Creek by Edwin Drake on August 27, 1859, launched the American petroleum Industry.

Fowler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on December 21, 1842. He served in the 21st New York Volunteers in 1861 – was wounded at the Second Battle of Bull Run a year later – and discharged at Boston in 1863. Read the rest of this entry »

The luck of John Washington Steele begins on December 10, 1844, when Culbertson and Sarah McClintock adopt him as an infant.

John Washington Steele of Venango County, Pennsylvania

Johnny Steele – who will one day will be known as “Coal Oil Johnny” – is adopted along with his sister, Permelia. The McClintocks bring them home to their farm on the banks of Oil Creek in Venango County, Pennsylvania.

Fifteen years later, the petroleum boom prompted by Edwin Drake’s discovery – America’s first commercial oil well – will make the widow McClintock a fortune in royalties.

When Mrs. McClintock dies in a kitchen fire in 1864, she leaves the money to her only surviving child, Johnny. At age 20, he inherits $24,500 and his mother’s 200-acre farm along Oil Creek between what is now Rynd Farm and Rouseville. The farm includes 20 producing wells yielding $2,800 in royalties a day.

“Coal Oil Johnny” Steele will earn his name in 1865 after such a legendary year of extravagance that years later the New York Times will report: “In his day, Steele was the greatest spender the world had ever known…he threw away $3,000,000 in less than a year.” Read the rest of this entry »

August 27, 1859 – Birth of U.S. Petroleum Industry

“August 27, 1859, is one of those special dates that changed the world,” notes one historian. “Edwin Drake’s quest to find oil by drilling was a success, and the modern oil and gas industry took a giant leap forward.”

The modern American petroleum industry is born in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The Seneca Oil Company’s highly speculative pursuit of oil is rewarded when Edwin L. Drake and his blacksmith driller, William “Uncle Billy” Smith, bring in the first commercial oil well at 69.5 feet near Oil Creek in Venango County. They launch a new industry.

For many Americans, western Pennsylvania in the 1850s was considered wilderness. When a group of New Haven, Connecticut, investors sought someone to drill in a region known for its oil seeps, they turned to a former railroad conductor already familiar with the area. It also helped that Drake was allowed free passage on trains.

Although earlier cable-tool drillers of brine wells had found small amounts of oil – an unwanted byproduct – “Colonel” Drake’s 1859 discovery well along Oil Creek would launch the modern petroleum industry. As a result of his perseverance, many new products, including newly invented kerosene, would create the demand for oil and natural gas that continues to this day. Read the rest of this entry »

Travelers on U.S. 62 four miles south of the Allegheny River Bridge at Tidioute, Pennsylvania, discover this Warren County roadside marker erected in July 1959.

Few remember the names of those who come in second — they often are relegated to the “also rans,” no matter how close to the finish. Petroleum history is the same.

Second-place finishers most often dwell in the fine print of history. Consider America’s first oil well.

Edwin L. Drake drilled his famous well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. As a result, the Drake Well Museum today draws thousands of visitors each year. The discovery’s 2009 sesquicentennial was commemorated in the “valley that changed the world.”

August 27, 1859, marks the date of America’s first oil well. But August 31 – just four days later – is ignored. It was on that day that a second oil well was drilled by a young man named John Livingston Grandin.

A few days after “Drake’s Folly” at Titusville surprised everybody by producing barrels of oil from a depth of 69.5 feet, the news arrived in Tidioute’s General Store, 20 miles away. Each barrel was said to be selling for 75 cents and 23-year-old John Grandin, the owner’s son and an aspiring entrepreneur, saw an opportunity. Read the rest of this entry »

“Sometimes, when researching history, you find places where it’s still alive. My search for the Tin Man’s mythic oil-can led me to such a spot. L. Frank Baum sold cans of buggy wheel oil for a living as the co-owner of Baum’s Castorine Company of Syracuse, New York.” -  Oz historian Evan L. Schwartz.

The future world-famous author of the children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz once sold petroleum products in Syracuse, New York. In 1883, L. Frank Baum and his brother Benjamin launched a small business offering lubricants, oils, greases – and “Baum’s Castorine, the great axle oil.”

L. Frank Baum — whose father found great success in Pennsylvania oilfields — would serve as chief salesman for Baum’s Castorine Company, which he founded with his brother on July 9, 1883, but sold only a few years later. The petroleum products company today operates in Rome, New York.

Reporting on the July 9, 1883, opening, the Syracuse Daily Courier newspaper noted that Baum’s Castorine was a rust-resistant axle grease concoction for machinery, buggies, and wagons. The grease was advertised to be “so smooth it makes the horses laugh.” Read the rest of this entry »