Charles Duryea claimed the first U.S. patent for a gasoline automobile in 1895. Henry Ford sold his first “Quadri-cycle” in 1896. At the turn of the century, about 8,000 vehicles shared mostly unpaved roads with horses and wagons.

In 1906, a “Stanley Steamer” (above) set the world land speed record at 127.7 m.p.h. – still officially recognized as the land speed record for a steam car.

Of the 4,200 automobiles sold in the United States at the turn of the century, gasoline powered less than 1,000. On November 3, 1900, America’s first national automobile show opened in New York City’s Madison Square Garden. 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 »

In 1883, tales of a fabled “tar spring” may have inspired a wildcatter – Pennsylvanian Mike Murphy – to drill Wyoming’s first oil well.

A Salt Creek, Wyoming, oil boom begins in 1908. Production continues today thanks to new technologies.

In 1837, Washington Irving published The Adventures of Captain Bonneville: or, Scenes beyond the Rocky Mountains of the Far West. Eastern readers were spellbound by Capt. Benjamin Bonneville’s four-year expedition, encounters with Indians, and detailed accounts of life on the fur-trapping trail.

In the unforgiving lands that would one day become the Wyoming Territory, Bonneville traveled down the Popo Agie River and in 1832 made note of a natural resource that would one day bring a new industry to the state of Wyoming:

“In this neighborhood, the captain made search for ‘the great Tar Spring,’ one of the wonders of the mountains, the medicinal properties of which he had heard extravagantly lauded by the trappers. After a toilsome search, he found it at the foot of a sand-bluff, a little east of the Wind River Mountains, where it exuded in a small stream of the color and consistency of tar. Read the rest of this entry »

January 30, 1916 – Standard Oil promotes Petroleum Product “Nujol”

Standard Oil Company of New Jersey takes out a full-page advertisement in the New York Sun extolling the virtues of “Nujol,” one of the company’s many petroleum-based products.

A 1916 Standard Oil advertisement joins much earlier patent medicine promoters of petroleum’s medicinal value.

Nujol offers “Internal Lubrication As A Means To Health,” the ad proclaims. One historian will later note that “physicians disagree with the sales department of Standard Oil on this point.”

Standard promises to send a pint of Nujol anywhere in the United States for 75 cents in stamps or coin.

Since primitive people first found medicinal solutions in natural oil seeps, petroleum has been used with greater or lesser success to heal a variety of ailments. By  the 19th century, patent medicines and their “miraculous” curative claims have become part of American culture. In the 1840s, one such cure-all was American Medicinal Oil. It came from naturally occurring petroleum seeps in Kentucky.

Nancy Kier of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, will treat her consumption (tuberculosis) with oil. Her enterprising husband Samuel then begins packaging eight-ounce bottles and selling them for 50 cents through traveling salesmen and pharmacies.

He proclaims: ”KIER’S GENUINE PETROLEUM! OR ROCK OIL! A NATURAL REMEDY, Procured from a Well 400 feet deep, and possessing wonderful Curative Powers in diseases…”

A label from Samuel Kier’s patent medicine shows cable-tool rigs used for drilling brine wells — and soon for oil wells to launch the U.S. petroleum industry.

Kier’s patent medicine advertisement featuring brine-well wooden derricks is remembered for inspiring industrialist George Bissell to wonder if the same apparatus could be adapted to extract quantities of rock oil — from which highly prized kerosene could be distilled.

Bissell’s insight will ultimately lead to formation of the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company — and birth of the American petroleum industry on August 27, 1859.

New products like “petroleum jelly” patented in 1872 as “Vaseline” — will prove superior in preventing infections for common abrasions. Its inventor, Robert Chesebrough, consumed a spoonful of Vaseline every day and lived to be 96 years old. Read “A Crude Story: Mabel’s Eyelashes.” Read the rest of this entry »

This section of the society’s energy education contacts begins with petroleum-related programs of the U.S. government, including a list of federal resources for teachers, students and industry researchers. Also see our list of State Energy Education Contacts.

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