January 9, 1862 – American Oil arrives in London

America exports oil for the first time when the brig Elizabeth Watts arrives at London’s Victoria dock after a six-week voyage from Philadelphia. The vessel carries 901 barrels of oil and 428 barrels of kerosene from the booming oilfields of Oil Creek, Pennsylvania.

No ship has ever crossed the Atlantic bearing such cargo. In America, anxious sailors had feared the vessel would explode before casting off on November 19, 1861. The shippers are the highly successful Philadelphia import-export firm of Peter Wright & Sons, which since its founding in 1818 has prospered transporting “china, glass, and Queensware” among other commodities.

Within a year Philadelphia will export 239,000 barrels of oil – without the technology of railroad tank cars or “tanker” ships. America will become a net importer of oil in 1948.

January 10, 1870 – Rockefeller incorporates Standard Oil Company

Seven years after leaving his successful commercial mercantile partnership to enter the petroleum refining business, John D. Rockefeller and five partners absorb the firm of Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler to form the Standard Oil Company in Cleveland, Ohio.

With $1 million in capital and an initial market share of about 10 percent, Standard Oil focuses on efficiency and growth. Instead of buying barrels, it buys tracts of oak timber, hauls the dried timber to Cleveland on its own wagons, and builds the barrels in its own cooperage. Standard’s cost per barrel drops from $3 to less than $1.50.

The company’s increasingly efficient refineries extract more kerosene per barrel of oil (there is no market for gasoline at the time). Along with vertical integration and the use of innovative technologies, the company purchases properties through subsidiaries, co-opts competitors, and uses local price-cutting to capture 90 percent of America’s refining capacity.

Rockefeller will continue his control over the domestic petroleum industry by reorganizing his assets into the Standard Oil Trust on January 2, 1882. More legal maneuvering will preserve his empire until 1911.

January 10, 1901 – Spindletop Discovery launches Modern Petroleum Industry

The modern oil and natural gas industry is born on a hill in southeastern Texas, when a wildcat well erupts on Spindletop Hill in Beaumont. The discovery will change the future of American industry and transportation — and bring new oilfield technologies.

The oil boom is welcomed. It comes just four months after the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history has devastated nearby Galveston.

The story of the Spindletop discovery well — 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.

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.

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) 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.

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.”

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.”

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. It 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 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. 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.”

January 10, 1919 – Elk Hills Field discovery in California

The Elk Hills field in Kern County, California, is discovered by Standard Oil of California’s No. 1 Hay well at 2,500 feet on faulted anticlines.

“Elk Hills Oil Field in California’s San Joaquin Valley ranks among the most productive oil fields in the United States,” notes an Earth Observatory website maintained by NASA. The oilfield “was embroiled in a 1920s-era lease scandal, returned to the management of the United States government, and privatized again in the 1990s.”

In September 1992, Elk Hills yielded its billionth barrel of oil, becoming the thirteenth oilfield in U.S. history to pass that milestone. The field continues to serve as a contingency source of oil for the U.S. Navy — Naval Petroleum Reserve One. Visit the “Black Gold” exhibit of the Kern County Museum in Bakersfield and at the West Kern Oil Museum in Taft.

January 10, 1921 – Major Oil Strike in Southern Arkansas

The Busey-Armstrong No. 1 well strikes oil and catapults the population of El Dorado, Arkansas, from 4,000 to 25,000. “Twenty-two trains a day were soon running in and out of El Dorado,” notes the Arkansas Gazette. The state legislature announces plans for a special legislative railway excursion to visit the new oil well. H.L. Hunt arrives in El Dorado with a borrowed $50 and joins lease traders and speculators at the Garrett Hotel – where fortunes will be made and lost.

“Located on a hill a little over a mile southwest of El Dorado and the derrick was plainly visible from the town,” note A. R. and R. B. Buckalew in their The Discovery of Oil in South Arkansas, 1920-1924. “The well had been drilled to 2,233 feet and the Nacatoch sand had been reached, a small crowd of eager spectators gathered at the rig, beginning about noon,” the authors note. “Drilling had ceased and baling operations had begun to try to bring in the well. At about 4:30 p.m., as the bailer was being lifted from its sixth trip into the deep hole, a rumble from deep in the well was heard.”

The drilling crew, after moving a safe distance away, watch — and listen. “The spectators, among them Dr. Busey, watched with ‘an air of expectancy.’ The rumbling grew in intensity, shaking the derrick and the very ground on which it stood as if an earthquake were passing. Suddenly, with a deafening roar, ‘a thick black column’ of gas and oil and water shot out of the well,” the Buckalews report. The gusher blows through the derrick and “bursts into a black mushroom” cloud against the January sky.

“It was a scene never again to be equaled in El Dorado’s history, nor would the town and its people ever be the same again,” the authors conclude. “Union County’s dream of oil had come true. Busey No. 1, the ‘Discovery Well’ of the El Dorado Oil Field yielded 15,000,000 to 35,000,000 cubic feet of gas and from 3,000 to 10,000 barrels of oil and water a day.”

Visit the Arkansas Natural Resources Museum in Smackover — the heart of the 60-square-mile Smackover field. The museum includes a five-acre Oilfield Park with operating examples of oil producing technologies used in south Arkansas oilfields from the 1920s to today. Also read “H.L. Hunt and the East Texas Oilfield.”

January 11, 1926 – Oil Boom begins in Borger, Texas

Dixon Creek Oil and Refining Company brings in the Smith No. 1 well flowing 10,000 barrels a day in southern Hutchinson County, Texas.  A. P. “Ace” Borger from Tulsa, Oklahoma, quickly secures a 240-acre tract and by September the Borger Oil Field has 813 producing wells, yielding 165,000 barrels a day. Borger will lay out streets for the town, which grows to a city of 15,000 in 90 days.

American artist Thomas Hart Benton visits the newborn boom town of Borger, noting, “there was a carbon (black) mill out there that burnt thousands of cubic feet of gas every minute, a great, wasteful, extravagant burning of resources for momentary profit. There was a belief, written in men’s faces, that all would find a share in the gifts of this mushroom town…Borger on the boom was a big party…where capital…joined hands with everybody in a great democratic dance.”

Burton will paint Boomtown in 1928. Today at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, it is “one of the masterpieces of the Gallery’s collection because of its impressive and unique depiction of an American landscape.”

Dedicated in 1977, the Hutchinson County Boom Town Museum celebrates Oil Boom Heritage every March. Special exhibits, events, and school tours occur throughout the Borger celebration. The museum, located in a 1927 building, maintains an exhibit across the street — a standard drilling rig with related equipment.

January 13, 1957 – New Petroleum Product takes off

The latest petroleum product is born in California when Wham-O Manufacturing Company begins production of its flying plastic “Pluto Platters” –which will soon become known universally as “Frisbees.”

The toy originates in 1948 when World War II veterans Walter Morrison and Warren Franscioni form Partners in Plastic to sell their newly invented “Flyin’ Saucers” for 25 cents each. “Two local men, pooling resources after the words ‘flying saucers’ shocked the world a year ago, have invented a new, patented plastic toy shaped like the originally reported saucer,” reports the San Luis Obispo Telegram-Tribune.

Wham-O buys the rights to the “flying toy” in 1955. Meanwhile, sales take off for a revolutionary polyethylene plastic developed by two Phillips Petroleum Company chemists in Bartlesville, Oklahoma — thanks to demand for Hula-Hoops and Frisbees. Read “Petroleum Product Hoopla.”

January 14, 1928 – Standard Oil Ads feature Dr. Seuss Critters

New York City’s Judge magazine includes its first cartoon drawn by Theodore Seuss Geisel — who will develop his unique skills as “Dr. Seuss” while working for Standard Oil Company.

In the cartoon that launches his career, Geisel draws a peculiar dragon trying to dodge “Flit,” a popular bug spray of the day.

Flit is one of Standard Oil Company’s many consumer products derived from petroleum. For years to follow, Dr. Seuss’ fanciful menagerie will populate Standard Oil advertisements. “It wasn’t the greatest pay, but it covered my overhead so I could experiment with my drawings.”

In 1936, Seuss designed Standard Oil’s Essomarine booth for the National Motorboat Show and created a “Seuss Navy.” Visitors were commissioned as admirals and photographed with Seuss’ whimsical characters made of cardboard. Geisel will acknowledge that his experience working at Standard Oil, “taught me conciseness and how to marry pictures with words.”

Read more in “Seuss I am, an Oilman.”