March 4, 1918 – West Virginia Well sets World Depth Record

On the Martha Goff farm in Harrison County, West Virginia, the Hope Natural Gas Company drills to 7,386 feet and brings the world’s deepest well record to America.

Until then, the deepest well had been drilled to 7,345 feet near Czuehon, Germany.

A March 1974 well set a world record while drilling in Oklahoma’s Anadarko Basin, about 12 miles west of Cordell. The Bertha Rogers No. 1 drilled almost six miles into Oklahoma’s Anadarko Basin before the drill bit stuck.

Today, rotary rigs in the Gulf of Mexico reach up to 35,000 feet deep. A 1970s experimental well on Russia’s Kola Peninsula during the Soviet era exceeded 40,000 feet – after ten years of drilling. Visit the Oil and Gas Museum in Parkersburg, West Virginia. 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 »

July 2, 1910 – President Taft establishes Naval Petroleum Reserves

The U.S.S. Texas was the last American battleship to be built with coal-fired boilers. By 1927 she had been converted to burn fuel oil and served throughout World War II. The battleship now is a floating museum in LaPorte, Texas.

As the U.S. Navy rapidly converts from coal to oil-burning ships, President William Howard Taft establishes three Naval Petroleum Reserves.

National security concerns about an assured oil supply in the event of war or a national emergency resulted in the Pickett Act of 1910, which authorizes the president to withdraw large areas of potential oil-bearing lands in California and Wyoming as sources of fuel for the Navy.

Within 15 years, the properties that make up the Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves include the three Naval Petroleum Reserves and three Naval Oil Shale Reserves. A Naval Petroleum Reserve Number Four, on the north slope of Alaska, is added in 1923.

“As not only the largest owner of oil lands, but as a prospective large consumer of oil by reason of the increasing use of fuel oil by the Navy, the federal government is directly concerned both in encouraging rational development and at the same time insuring the longest possible life to the oil supply.” -  Message to Congress by President Taft Read the rest of this entry »