by Bruce Wells | Jul 27, 2026 | This Week in Petroleum History
July 27, 1918 – Standard Oil of New York launches Concrete Tanker –
America’s first concrete vessel designed to carry oil, the Socony, left its shipyard at Flushing Bay, New York. Built for the Standard Oil Company of New York, the barge was 98 feet long with a 32-foot beam. It carried oil in six center and two wing compartments, “oil-proofed by a special process,” according to the journal Cement and Engineering News. (more…)
by Bruce Wells | Jul 24, 2026 | Petroleum Pioneers
Once called “night riders of the hemlocks,” petroleum sleuths separated oil well fact from fiction.
During the cold winter of 1888, 37-year-old oil scout Justus C. McMullen succumbed to pneumonia contracted while investigating oil production from a well in the wooded hills near Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.
McMullen, publisher of the Bradford “Petroleum Age” newspaper, already had contributed much to America’s early petroleum industry as a journalist and oilfield detective.
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