by Bruce Wells | Mar 9, 2026 | This Week in Petroleum History
An oil tanker became the world’s first electrically welded commercial vessel when the Texas Company (later Texaco) tanker M/S Carolinian was completed in Charleston, South Carolina. The World War I shipbuilding boom had encouraged new electric welding technologies. Naval architect Richard Smith designed the Texas Company’s pioneering 226-ton vessel. (more…)
by Bruce Wells | Mar 6, 2026 | Petroleum Pioneers
An 1829 well drilled with a spring-pole seeking brine found petroleum instead. Production from the “Kentucky’s Great American Oil Well” would be bottled and sold for medicinal purposes. Also known as the “Old American Well,” the fortuitous discovery was among the earliest commercial oil wells in the United States.
Although drilling specifically for oil would not begin until three decades later in Titusville, Pennsylvania (see First American Oil Well), the Kentucky well struck a highly pressurized geologic formation, making the failed brine well one of the nation’s first oil gushers.
