by Bruce Wells | Aug 1, 2025 | Petroleum Technology
A flammable workplace brings danger everywhere.
Whether ignited by accident, natural phenomena, or acts of war, oilfield fires have challenged the petroleum industry since the earliest wells. Catastrophic fires — and technologies needed to fight them — began with the first U.S. well, completed on August 27, 1859, at Oil Creek in northwestern Pennsylvania.
Just six weeks after his discovery, Edwin L. Drake’s well caught fire when driller William “Uncle Billy” Smith inspected the well with an open lamp, igniting seeping natural gas. Flames consumed the cable-tool derrick, engine-pump house, stored oil, and Smith’s nearby shack.
Drake Well Museum exhibits at Oil Creek in Titusville, Pennsylvania, include a replica of the cable-tool derrick and engine house that drilled the first U.S. well in 1859.
Today, visitors to the Drake Well Museum at Titusville tour the latest reconstructed cable-tool derrick and its engine house along Oil Creek, where the former railroad conductor found oil at a depth of 69.5 feet. He revealed a geologic formation later called the Venango sandstone.
Another Drake Well Museum exhibit preserves the Titusville Fire Department’s coal-fired steam pumper (see Oilfield Photographer John Mather). As the new U.S. petroleum industry learned from hard experience, firefighting technologies evolved in northwestern Pennsylvania’s “Valley that Changed the World.”
Hard Lessons
In 1861, an explosion and fire at Henry Rouse’s gushing oil well made national news when he was killed along with 18 workers and onlookers (see Rouseville 1861 Oil Well Fire). In 1977, the Smithsonian American Art Museum acquired landscape artist James Hamilton’s “Burning Oil Well at Night, near Rouseville, Pennsylvania,” painted soon after the fire.
The dangerous operating environment of a cable-tool rig included a spinning bull wheel, a rising and falling heavy wooden beam, a steam boiler, and crowded spaces.
The pounding iron drill bit frequently needed to be withdrawn and hammered sharp using a small, but red-hot forge, often set up just feet from the wellbore.
Lighting striking derricks and oilfield tank farms also would prove challenging.
Preserved by the Smithsonian, “Burning Oil Well at Night, near Rouseville, Pennsylvania,” circa 1861, an oil painting by James Hamilton, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.
Late 19th-century oilfield fire prevention remained rudimentary as exploration moved westward. Safety lamps like one with two spouts, popularly known as the “Yellow Dog” lantern, were not particularly safe. The rapidly growing petroleum industry needed new technologies for preventing fires or putting them out.
As drilling experience grew, refineries responded to skyrocketing public demand for the lamp fuel kerosene. Production from new oilfields in Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma led to construction of safer storage facilities, but advances in drilling deeper wells brought fresh challenges (see Ending Oil Gushers – BOP).
Firefighting with Cannons
Especially in early oilfields, working in such a flammable workplace could bring danger from everywhere — including the sky. Lightning strikes on wooden storage tanks created flaming cauldrons.
A circa 1915 photo of a cannon — possibly a “Model 1819,” according to The Artilleryman Magazine (Fall 2019, vol. 40, no. 4) — firing solid shot in an attempt to create a hole to drain the burning oil tank. “No one appears to be near the gun, so it may have been fired using fuse or electrically.” Photo courtesy Oklahoma Historical Society.
In the rush to exploit early oilfields, wooden derricks crowded an oil-soaked landscape, leaving workers — and nearby towns — dangerously exposed to an accidental conflagration. Many oil patch community oil museums have retained examples of early smooth-bore cannon used to fight fires.
A Civil-War era field cannon exhibit in Corsicana, Texas, tells the story of a cannon from the Magnolia Petroleum Company tank farm. “It was used to shoot a hole in the bottom of the cypress tanks if lightning struck,” a plaque notes. “The oil would drain into a pit around the tanks and be pumped away.”
Learn more in Oilfield Artillery fights Fires.
Oilfield firefighting using cannons has continued into the 21st century. In May 2020, a well operated by the Irkutsk Oil Company in Russia’s Siberian region ignited a geyser of flaming oil and natural gas. When efforts to control the blowout failed, the Russian Defense Ministry flew in a 1970s anti-tank gun and its Hungarian crew.
From about 200 yards away, the Hungarian artillerymen (Covid-19 masked) repeatedly fired their 100-millimeter, smooth-bore Rapira MT-12 gun at blazing oilfield equipment, “breaking it from the well and allowing crews to seal the well,” according to the Russian Defense Ministry.
In addition to using cannons to fire well fires, other techniques have included smothering them using cranes to lower iron metal caps (see Kansas Gas Well Fire) or detonating an explosive from above to rob the flames of air. Using a wind machine must count among the more unusual methods.
Firefighting with Wind
In 1929, about 400 volunteers took on a raging oilfield fire that had destroyed seven derricks and two oil well “heavy producers” at Santa Fe Springs, California. “Roaring Flames Turn Black Gold To Smoke,” proclaimed a Los Angeles Times headline on June 12.
The Santa Fe Springs Hathaway Ranch and Oil Museum, “a museum of five generations of Hathaway family and Southern California history,” has preserved rare motion picture clips of a propeller-driven “Wind-making Machine” in action — although the wind proved no match for the flames.
“The machine that made the wind that conquered a fire in a Santa Fe Springs oilfield on June 15, 1929,” used a three-bladed airplane propeller and a powerful motor to blow heat away from the men at work fighting the fire. “A track of boards was built for the machine over a lake of oil, mud and water in the ‘hot zone’ of the big fire.” — Hathaway Ranch and Oil Museum, Santa Fe Springs, California.
The fire depicted in the silent film is intense, “so firefighting equipment is appropriately distant from the well head, including the wind machine,” explained museum Curator of Media Archives Terry Hathaway.
“It looks like its use is more or less limited to blowing hot air, smoke and steam (from firefighting water hoses) away from the workers and toward the fire,” he added.
Hathaway explained that the wind machine on the back of a truck probably had no direct influence on the fire itself, due to distance and the ferocity of the high-pressure well blowout, “but it apparently may have made things more tenable for the firefighters by keeping them relatively cool and smoke free.”
A modern version of the 1929 wind-making machine returned in 1991, after Saddam Hussein’s retreating Iraqi army set hundreds of wells ablaze in Kuwait oilfields. Firefighting technologies by then had evolved into using jet engines. MB Drilling Company of Szolnok, Hungary, sent a three-man team with “Big Wind,” a modern version of the 1929 wind-making machine.
Instead of a piston-driven propeller on a vintage truck bed, twin MIG-21 turbojets were mounted in place of the turret on a World War II Soviet T-34 tank. The jet engines generated 700 mph of thrust, which blasted hundreds of gallons of water per second into the flames.
Image from Romanian video of 1991 Kuwaiti oilfields: “Twin MIG-21 turbojets mounted on a World War II era Soviet T-34 tank dubbed ‘Big Wind’ generated 700 mph thrust blasting hundreds of gallons of water per second into the fire.”
The Hungarian team members put out their assigned fires and recapped nine wells in 43 days, according to a 2001 Car and Driver article, “Stilling the Fires of War.”
“Hell Fighters”
Many firefighting teams went to Kuwait following the Persian Gulf War, including Paul “Red” Adair, whose dramatic oilfield feats had been popularized in the 1968 movie “Hellfighters.” Adair and his team extinguished 117 Kuwaiti oil well fires by robbing the flames of oxygen using explosives.
As the Hungarian crew chief of “Big Wind” observed at the time, “Would you really want to walk up to a 2,000-degree flame through burning heat and oil rain carrying explosives?”
A century earlier, Karl T. Kinley did just that. Kinley, a California oil well “shooter” (see Shooters — A History of Fracking) during the early 1900s, learned from first-hand experience that a dynamite explosion could “blow out” a wellhead fire. Kinley’s son, Myron Macy Kinley, established the oilfield service business M.M. Kinley Company after learning from his father’s highly dangerous experiments.
Readers Digest in 1953 declared Myron M. Kinley “the unrivaled world-champion fighter of oil fires.” A TIME article described him as “the indispensable man of the oil industry.”
But with the chance of terrible injuries or death ever present, firefighting success was not without cost. Kinley’s brother Floyd was killed by falling rig debris in 1938 as they fought a runaway well fire near Goliad, Texas.
A 1950 Daily Oklahoman newspaper image captioned, “This 55-gallon steel drum was the bomb casing that held the explosive punch. (M. M. Kinley and Paul Adair, Houston firemen, are at either end, Harold Drilling, Elk City welder, kneeling).” Photo courtesy Oklahoma Historical Society.
Kinley, a mentor of “Red” Adair, developed technologies at M.M. Kinley Company that inspired other firefighting experts, including Joe R. Bowden Sr., who founded Wild Well Control in 1975 to provide emergency response, safety training, and relief well engineering.
After they had worked for the Red Adair Service and Marine Company, Asger “Boots” Hansen and “Coots” Mathews opened an office in Houston in 1978 for what could become Boots & Coots International Well Control (today a Halliburton Company).
Other oilfield pioneers include Cudd Pressure Control — today, Cudd Well Control, founded by Bobby Joe Cudd, another pioneer of emergency well control techniques. Cudd established his Woodward, Oklahoma-based company in 1977 with eight employees and a “hydraulic snubbing unit.”
Adair had joined Myron Kinley’s California oilfield service company after serving with a U.S. Army bomb disposal unit during World War II. After starting his own company in 1959, “Red” improved firefighting technologies, developing new tools, equipment, and techniques for “wild well” control.
Adair was 75 years old when he successfully tamed roaring fires in Kuwait’s scorched oilfields. As early as 1962, his Red Adair Company had “put out a Libyan oil well fire that had burned so brightly that astronaut John Glenn could see it from space,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
USSR Firefighting Nukes
Between 1966 and 1981, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics snuffed out runaway fires at natural gas wells using subsurface nuclear detonations. The experiments, part of the broader “Program No. 7 – Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy,” imitated a U.S. initiative, “Plowshare,” seeking peaceful uses of nuclear bombs (see Project Gasbuggy tests Nuclear “Fracking”).
According to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USSR scientists code-named five secret attempts: Urta-Bulak, Pamuk, Crater, Fakel, and Pyrite.
The first experimental detonation, Urta-Bulak in 1966, came after three years and failed conventional attempts to extinguish a blazing natural gas well in Southern Uzbekistan. Scientists positioned a special 30-kiloton package within 300 feet of the borehole by slant drilling.
Detonated in clay strata at a depth of 4,921 feet, the nuclear explosion’s shock wave sealed the well within 23 seconds, staunching the daily waste of 423 million cubic feet of natural gas, reported Russian television.
Video image showing a USSR nuclear device being lowered into well for a detonation shockwave to extinguish a runaway oilfield fire. A Russian newspaper reported a 1966 nuclear blast used to put out a natural gas well fire in Uzbekistan.
In 1968, the Pamuk well explosion used a larger, 47-kiloton nuclear device that measured 9.5 inches by 10 feet. Two years of uncontrolled natural gas and a heavily saturated surrounding landscape yielded to the nuclear detonation at a depth of 8,000 feet. The runaway gas well died out seven days later.
Twice in 1972, USSR scientists used lower-yield detonations to extinguish massive fires. The smallest of the nuclear firefighting devices (3.8 kiloton) on July 7 squelched a runaway gas well fire in Ukraine, about 12 miles north of Krasnograd.
The USSR program’s only recorded failure came in 1981 with the last Soviet use of firefighting nukes. On May 5, a nuclear device failed to shut down a 56 million cubic feet per day out-of-control natural gas well. The code-named Pyrite device had been positioned proximate to the well at a depth of 4,957 feet.
The 37.6-kiloton detonation in a sandstone-clay formation failed to seal the gas well, according to the USSR Ministry of Defense, which provided little more information.
By the 1950s, America was considering how to use nuclear weapons for constructive purposes — “Atoms for Peace.” In December 1961, the Plowshare Program began examining the feasibility of various projects, including the Project Gasbuggy tests to improve natural gas production. Those tests worked, but yielded radioactive gas.
Neither the Project Plowshare nor the Soviet Union’s Program No. 7 produced desirable results. With or without nukes, oilfield work then and now remains among the most dangerous jobs in the world. Safety and prevention methods have improved along with the technologies since the industry’s earliest wells in northwestern Pennsylvania.
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Recommended Reading: The Birth of the Oil Industry (1936); Trek of the Oil Finders: A History of Exploration for Petroleum (1975); The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (1991); Myth, Legend, Reality: Edwin Laurentine Drake and the Early Oil Industry
(2009). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.
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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Become an annual supporter to help maintain this energy education website, this week in oil and gas history, a monthly email newsletter, and expand historical research. Pease contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2026 Bruce A. Wells.
Citation Information – Article Title: “Exploring Oilfield Firefighting Technologies.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/technology/oilfield-firefighting-technologies. Last Updated: August 1, 2025. Original Published Date: January 31, 2022.
by Bruce Wells | May 30, 2025 | Petroleum Art
Thousands of glass-negative images document the earliest scenes of America’s petroleum industry.
Soon after the first American oil well in 1859 launched the U.S. petroleum industry in remote northwestern Pennsylvania, an English emigrant began documenting life in the oilfields.
John A. Mather (1829-1915) photographed the people, places and technology from the earliest days of oil exploration. In the fall of 1860, he set up his first studio in Titusville, Pennsylvania — where he would begin to amass more than 20,000 glass-plate negatives.
Oil Creek Artist
Titusville and nearby Oil City and Franklin, in the heart of the growing Pennsylvania oil regions (soon joined by the boom town of Pithole), proved ideal locations for documenting the people, events and evolving drilling technologies of petroleum exploration and production.
Iconic but often misidentified 1866 photo by John A. Mather features Edwin L. Drake (in top hat) with friend Peter Wilson standing at the rebuilt derrick and engine house of the 1859 first U.S. commercial oil well. Photo courtesy Drake Well Museum and Park.
What Civil War photographers Matthew Brady and James Gardner documented on battlefields, Mather accomplished in Pennsylvania’s oilfields. In 1866, Titusville’s “Oil Creek Artist” photographed the now iconic image of Edwin L. Drake, standing at the original drilling site (rebuilt after the first oil well fire).
Like Brady, Mather abandoned making one-of-kind daguerreotypes and ambrotypes in favor of wet plate negatives using collodion — a flammable, syrupy mixture also called “nitrocellulose.” With one glass plate, many paper copies of an image could be printed and sold.
Oilfield photographer John Aked Mather, probably a self-portrait circa 1900.
However, unlike most of the era’s studio photographers, Mather transported his camera and chemicals into the industrial chaos of early Pennsylvania oilfields. But like most people in the new oil region, Mather was susceptible to “oil fever;” he hoped to drill some successful wells himself.
Oil Fever
Above all, the oil regions continued to boom. The gamble of drilling for new oilfield discoveries brought excitement. As “oil fever” spread, polka and waltz song sheets like the Petroleum Court Dance became popular.
Having narrowly missed the opportunity for a one-sixteenth share of the Sherman Well, which proved to be the “best single strike of the year,” Mather and three associates invested in oil wells near booming Pithole Creek. He proved to be better at using a camera.
John Mather photographs courtesy Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine and Drake Well Museum, Titusville. Above, the interior of his Titusville studio, circa 1865.
Mather’s investment in finding oil at Pithole Creek did not lead to producing any commercial quantities. He tried again on the Holmden Farm off West Pithole Creek. His unsuccessful drilling effort proved to be one of the last wells in the infamous boom town Pithole.
Many tried, but few in the increasingly crowded oil regions would rival the wealth of the celebrated “Coal Oil Johnny.” Years later, Mather acknowledged that the excitement of the drilling for “black gold” was so great that he “forsook photography for the oil business.”
Meanwhile, the young U.S. petroleum industry learned some hard lessons. Highly pressurized wells and disasters like the 1861 fatal Rouseville oil well fire brought attention to a new science, petroleum geology.
Detail from the 19th-century stereoview “Oil Regions of Pennsylvania,” published by C. W. Woodward of Rochester, N.Y., featuring John Mather’s floating studio and dark room.
Returning to the oilfields with his camera, Mather’s rolling darkroom and floating studio traveled up and down Oil Creek. In 2008, photographic historian John Craig (1943-2011) noted the discovery of a Mather image in a stereoview card published by C.W. Woodward.
“We have had the card for years and assumed that the boat belonged to Woodward,” the historian noted. “When I made the scan I noticed that the side of the boat carried a sign ‘Oil Creek Artist.’ I Googled and found that the studio/darkroom boat belonged to John A. Mather.”
At its peak, Mather’s collection amounted to more than 16,000 glass negatives. The trade magazine Petroleum Age described his oilfield photography as “so perfect in finish it stands the test of time.”
Oil Creek Flood and Fire
On Sunday morning June 5, 1892, and after weeks of rain, Oil Creek’s overflowing Spartansburg Dam failed at about 2:30 a.m. A wall of water and debris swelled towards Titusville and its oil works, seven miles downstream.
“On rushed the mad waters, tearing away bridge after bridge, carrying away horses, homes and people,” one newspaper reported about the flood’s devastation. Then fire erupted from ruptured benzine and oil storage tanks.
Oilfield workers pose on and among their oil derricks and engine houses in this 1864 John Mather photo from the Drake Well Museum collection in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
Newspapers all over America carried stories of the disaster. In Montana, the Helena Independent headlines included: “Waters of an Overflowing Creek Become a Rushing Mass of Flames” and victims being, “Spared by the Deluge Only to Become the Prey of the Fire.”
John Mather’s photographs documented family life in remote early oil boom towns. He also briefly caught “oil fever” and unsuccessfully invested in a few wells in the booming Pithole Creek field.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle added: “The Waters Subside and The Flames Die Away, Revealing the Full Extent of the Calamity.” Oil City and Titusville were “Nearly Wiped From Off the Earth.”
Unfortunately, Mather’s studio flooded to a depth of five feet, destroying expensive equipment — and most of his life’s work of prints from glass plate negatives.
Pennsylvania oil towns were “Nearly Wiped From Off the Earth” by an 1892 fire and flood that destroyed thousands of Mather’s prints and glass plates. Photo from Drake Well Museum collection.
As the fires and flood continued, Mather set up his camera and photographed the disaster in progress with his bulky equipment, which already was being rendered obsolete by new imaging technologies.
Photography Legacy
Just a few years before the Titusville flood, George Eastman of Rochester, New York, introduced celluloid roll film and created an entirely new market: amateur snapshot photography.
Expertise in preparing fragile glass plates and dangerous chemicals was no longer required. Instead, Kodak offered, “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest.”
The “Oil Creek Artist” visited potential customers using his floating darkroom.
As oil booms moved to discoveries in other states, including the massive 1901 “Lucas Gusher” in Texas, Mather worked little in his later years. His financial circumstances diminished with age and illness.
The Artist of Oil Creek died poor and without fanfare on August 23, 1915, in Titusville. His death certificate reported the cause as cerebral hemorrhage, “complicated by suppression of urine.”
An 1865 John Mather photograph of wooden derricks, engine houses, oilfield workers, an office (and tree stumps) at Pioneer Run – Oil Creek, Pennsylvania.
To preserve John A. Mather’s petroleum industry legacy, the Drake Well Memorial Association purchased 3,274 surviving glass negatives for about 30 cents each.
The Drake Well Museum has preserved the photographer’s surviving work. The museum and surrounding park allow visitors to explore rare artifacts and a visual record of the early U.S. oil and natural industry. Visit the Titusville museum along Oil Creek and other Pennsylvania petroleum museums.
More Resources
“Virtually unknown, certainly unheralded, and completely unappreciated — in these few words is a description of John Aked Mather, pioneer photographer, ” proclaimed Ernest C. Miller and T.K. Stratton in their January 1972 article, “Oildon’s Photographic Historian,” in The Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine (Volume 55, Number 1).
Born in Heapford Bury, England, in 1829, the son of an English papermill superintendent, Mather joined his two brothers in America in 1856. He soon became “transfixed by the beauty of the Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio regions,” explains a NWPaHeritage article, adding he developed an “obsessive desire to capture the industry in its entirety.”
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Recommended Reading: Western Pennsylvania’s Oil Heritage
(2008); Around Titusville, Pa., Images of America
(2004); Cherry Run Valley: Plumer, Pithole, and Oil City, Pennsylvania, Images of America (2000); Myth, Legend, Reality: Edwin Laurentine Drake and the Early Oil Industry
(2009). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.
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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. © 2026 Bruce A. Wells.
Citation Information – Article Title: “Oilfield Photographer John Mather.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-art/oilfield-photographer-john-mather. Last Updated: May 30, 2025. Original Published Date: March 11, 2005.
