by Bruce Wells | Aug 19, 2024 | This Week in Petroleum History
August 19, 1909 – Canadian Journal lampoons Standard Oil –
“The Standard Oil Company has decided to drive the cow and the dairyman out of business,” declared the Stanstead Journal of Quebec, reporting from Jersey City, New Jersey. “Its skilled chemists have discovered a process whereby they can make gilt-edge butter as a byproduct of crude petroleum.”
Journalists found humor in the approaching breakup of the Standard Oil Trust.
The journal fancifully proclaimed, “The chemists, in the steps leading up to the petroleum butter discovery, also have perfected a cheap process by which they can convert the kerosene into sweet milk.”
August 19, 1957 – First Commercial Oil Well in Washington
The first and only commercial oil well in the state of Washington was drilled by the Sunshine Mining Company. The Medina No. 1 well flowed 223 barrels a day from a depth of 4,135 feet near Ocean City in Grays Harbor County. The well produced 12,500 barrels before being capped in 1961.
Surrounded by unsuccessful attempts, Washington’s only commercial oil well (red) was capped in 1961.
By 2010, about 600 oil and natural gas wells had been drilled in Washington, but large-scale commercial production never occurred. The state’s most recent production — from the Ocean City field — ceased in 1962, according to the Washington Commissioner of Public Lands. No oil or gas has been produced since.
August 20, 1971 – Penn-Brad Oil Museum opens in Pennsylvania
Preserving the 1880s history of the world’s first billion dollar oilfield, the Bradford, Pennsylvania, Penn-Brad Oil Museum opened in nearby Custer City. At the end of the 19th century, the region produced high-quality oil from the upper Devonian Bradford Sands — accounting for more than 80 percent of U.S. production.
“A light golden amber to a deep moss-green in color, the ‘miracle molecule ‘ from the Bradford field is high in paraffin and considered one of the highest grade natural lubricant crude oils in the world,” explains the museum.
The Penn-Brad Museum and Historical Oil Well Park of Bradford, Pennsylvania, celebrates its 53rd birthday on August 20. Photo by Bruce Wells.
Outdoor exhibits include a replica 72-foot standard cable-tool derrick and engine house, and guided tours by oil country veterans educate visitors about “yellow dogs and barkers, headache posts, hurry-up sticks and sucker rods.”
Learn more Bradford oilfield history in Mrs. Alford’s Nitro Factory.
August 21, 1897 – Olds Motor Vehicle Company founded
American automotive pioneer Ransom Eli Olds (1864–1950) founded the Olds Motor Vehicle Company in Lansing, Michigan. Renamed Olds Motor Works in 1899, the company became the first auto manufacturer established in Detroit.
By 1901 Olds had built 11 prototype vehicles, including at least one powered by steam, electricity, and gasoline, according to historian George May. “He was the only American automotive pioneer to produce and sell at least one of each mode of automobile.”
Powered by a single-cylinder, five-horsepower gasoline engine, the 1901 Oldsmobile Curved Dash was the first mass-produced U.S. automobile.
The modern assembly line concept also began with Olds, who used a stationary assembly line (Henry Ford would be the first to use a moving assembly line). Olds Motor Works sold the first mass-produced automobile in 1901, one year after the first U.S. Auto Show.
When the last Oldsmobile rolled off an assembly line in Lansing in 2004, it was the end of America’s oldest automotive brand.
August 21, 1993 – Henry Rouse Monument rededicated
Family members rededicated the original 1865 monument to Henry R. Rouse at his estate near Youngsville, Pennsylvania. Rouse — a respected leader of the early oil industry — died on April 17, 1861, when his highly pressurized well exploded in flames at Rouseville (see Rouseville 1861 Oil Well Fire).
The 1865 monument to Henry Rouse was rededicated in 1993 during the annual family Picnic in Warren County, Pennsylvania. Photo courtesy the Rouse Estate.
The marble monument stands at the entrance to the Rouse Home, which has served the poor of the county as Mr. Rouse intended, according to the Rouse Estate, “a testimony to his philanthropy, and a reminder of the important role played by Rouse in serving the needs of the Warren County community.”
August 24, 1892 – Oil Company founded by “Prophet of Spindletop”
Patillo Higgins, who would become known as the “Prophet of Spindletop,” founded the Gladys City Oil, Gas & Manufacturing Company and leased 2,700 acres near Beaumont, Texas. Higgins believed oil-bearing sands could be found four miles south of town. Most earth science experts said he was wrong.
A self-taught geologist, Higgins had noticed oil and natural gas seeps at Spindletop Hill while taking his Sunday school class on picnics. He later supervised the planning of Gladys City, which he named for his favorite student.
Patillo Higgins was no longer with the company he had founded when it discovered oil at Spindletop Hill in January 1901.
Although Higgins left the Gladys City venture in 1895, Capt. Anthony Lucas drilled the “Lucas Gusher” for the company in January 1901 and forever changed the petroleum industry (the oilfield produced more oil in one day than the rest of the world’s fields combined). Gulf Oil, Texaco, Mobile, and Sun Oil companies got their start thanks to Patillo Higgins’ confidence in the “Big Hill.”
Learn more in Prophet of Spindletop.
August 24, 1923 – University of Texas receives Royalty Check
The University of Texas received the first oil royalty payment ($516.53) three months after the Santa Rita No. 1 well discovered an oilfield on university-owned land in the Permian Basin. After 21 months of difficult drilling, the Texon Oil and Land Company’s well had revealed the 4.5-square-mile Big Lake field.
Drilling and production equipment from the Santa Rita No. 1 well is preserved at the University of Texas. Photo by Bruce Wells.
Within three years of the Big Lake discovery, petroleum royalties endowed the university with $4 million. In 1958, the university moved the Santa Rita well’s walking beam and other equipment to the Austin campus. A student newspaper described the historic well as “one that made the difference between pine-shack classrooms and modern buildings.”
August 24, 1937 – Music Mountain Oil Discovery
No one had expected it, not even the Niagara Oil Company that drilled it, notes the Bradford Landmark Society about a 1937 gusher near Bradford, Pennsylvania, in McKean County. For the first time since the great Bradford field discovery 70 years earlier, an exploratory well on Music Mountain revealed a new oilfield.
The producing formation was beneath the older, highly prolific Bradford sands. The region’s high-paraffin oil is still considered among the best natural lubricants in the world. A refinery (today’s American Refining Group) has been processing McKean County oil since 1881.
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Recommended Reading: R.E. Olds: Auto Industry Pioneer
(1977); Spindletop: The True Story of the Oil Discovery that Changed the World (1980); Giant Under the Hill: A History of the Spindletop Oil Discovery at Beaumont, Texas, in 1901
(2008); Santa Rita: The University of Texas Oil Discovery
(1958); Images of America: Around Bradford
(1997). 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. Copyright © 2024 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
by Bruce Wells | May 20, 2024 | This Week in Petroleum History
May 20, 1930 – Geophysicists establish Professional Society –
Earth scientists in Houston established the Society of Economic Geophysicists to encourage the ethical practice of geophysics in the exploration and development of natural resources. The organization in 1937 adopted the name Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG), which in 2024 reported 14,000 members in 114 countries.
The Doodlebugger by Oklahoma sculptor Jay O’Melia has welcomed visitors to SEG headquarters since 2002. Photo by Bruce Wells.
SEG’s journal Geophysics began publishing in 1936 with articles on exploration technologies, including seismic, gravity, and magnetic imaging. The journal warned of hucksters using vague or unproven properties of oil and geological formations. At its Tulsa headquarters in 2002, SEG unveiled The Doodlebugger, a 10-foot bronze statue by Oklahoma sculptor Jay O’Melia, who also sculpted the Oil Patch Warrior, a World War II memorial.
May 21, 1923 – “Esso” first used by Standard Oil Company
For the first time, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey used “Esso” to market the company’s “refined, semi-refined, and unrefined oils made from petroleum, both with and without admixture of animal, vegetable, or mineral oils, for illuminating, burning, power, fuel, and lubricating purposes, and greases.”
Standard Oil of New Jersey’s logo from 1923 to 1934, when the text became much plainer and inside an ellipse.
In 1923, Esso — the phonetic spelling of the abbreviation “S.O.” for Standard Oil — became a registered trademark. The future children’s book author, Theodore Geisell, began drawing Essolube product ads in the 1930s. Exxon (now ExxonMobil) removed its U.S. Esso brand in 1973.
May 23, 1905 – Patent issued for Improved Metal Barrel Lid
Henry Wehrhahn, superintendent for the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company of Brooklyn, New York, received the first of two 1905 patents that presaged the modern 55-gallon oil drum. The first design included “a means for readily detaching and securing the head of a metal barrel.”
Wehrhahn assigned his patent rights to the widow of Robert Seaman, founder of Iron Clad Manufacturing — Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, journalist Nellie Bly. In December 1905, Wehrhahn also assigned her the rights to his improved metal barrel patent.
Learn more in Remarkable Nellie Bly’s Oil Drum.
May 23, 1937 – Death of World’s Richest Man
Almost 70 years after founding Standard Oil Company in Ohio and 40 years after retiring from the company in 1897, John D. Rockefeller died in Ormond Beach, Florida, at age 97. His petroleum empire had peaked in 1912.
Born on July 8, 1839, in Richford, New York, Rockefeller attended high school in Cleveland, Ohio, from 1853 to 1855. He became an assistant bookkeeper with a produce shipping company before forming his own company in 1859 — the same year of the first U.S. oil well in Pennsylvania. Rockefeller was 24 in 1865 when he took control of his first refinery, which would be the largest in the world three years later.
John Rockefeller, 1839-1937. Photo courtesy of Cleveland State University.
By the time his petroleum fortune peaked at $900 million in 1912 ($28.14 billion in 2023 dollars), Rockefeller’s philanthropy was well known. His unprecedented wealth funded the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, (now the Rockefeller Foundation), and Spelman College in Atlanta.
May 24, 1902 – Oil & Gas Journal published
Holland Reavis founded the Oil Investors’ Journal In Beaumont, Texas, to report on financial issues facing operators and investors in the giant oilfield discovered nearby one year earlier at Spindletop Hill. Reavis sold his semimonthly publication to Patrick Boyle of Oil City, Pennsylvania, in 1910.
Norman Rockwell illustrated a 1962 ad promoting the Oil and Gas Journal.
Boyle, a former oilfield scout and publisher of the Oil City Derrick, increased publication frequency to weekly and renamed it the Oil & Gas Journal. Following his death in 1920, son-in-law Frank Lauinger moved operations to Tulsa and further expanded the company, which became PennWell Publishing in 1980. The Derrick newspaper in Oil City, which began in 1885, continues to be published by the Boyle family.
May 24, 1920 – Huntington Beach Oilfield discovered in California
A Standard Oil Company well discovered the Huntington Beach oilfield. The beach town’s population grew from 1,500 to 5,000 within a month of the well drilled near Clay Avenue and Golden West Street. By November 1921 the field had 59 producing wells with daily production of 16,500 barrels of oil. Development activities and speculators drew national attention to this expansion of the Los Angeles oilfield.
Pictured here in 1926, the Huntington Beach field will produce more than one billion barrels of oil by 2000. Discovery Well Park today includes six acres with playgrounds. Photo courtesy Orange County Archives.
Huntington Beach produced more than 16 million barrels of oil in 1964, according to a 1991 Orange County Register article, which added that as oil production peaked, “the pressure of explosive population growth began pushing the wells off land that had become more valuable as sites for housing.”
May 26, 1891 – Patent will lead to Crayola Crayons
Crayola crayons began when Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith received a patent for their “Apparatus for the Manufacture of Carbon Black.” Their refining process produced a fine, intensely black soot-like substance — a pigment far better than any other at the time.
Petroleum products like carbon-black and paraffin in 1903 led to Crayola crayons and its classic marking product, Staonal. Photo courtesy Crayola.
The company mixed carbon black with oilfield paraffin to introduce a black crayon marker promoted as able to “stay on all” and accordingly named Staonal. In 1903, Binney & Smith Company began producing Crayola crayons in small batches of hand-mixed pigments and paraffin. The box included eight colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, brown and black.
Learn more in Carbon Black and Oilfield Crayons.
May 26, 1934 – Diesel-Electric Power sets Speed Record
A new diesel-electric “streamliner,” the Burlington Zephyr, pulled into Chicago’s Century of Progress exhibition after a nonstop 13 hour “dawn to dusk” run from Denver. The trip cut traditional steam locomotive times by half.
Chicago World’s Fair visitors admire the stainless steel Burlington Zephyr, which helped save America’s railroad passenger industry. Two-stroke diesel-electric engines provided a four-fold power to weight gain. Photo from a Burlington Route Railroad 1934 postcard.
Powered by a single, eight-cylinder diesel engine, the passenger train traveled 1,015 miles on its record-breaking run. The Zephyr burned just $16.72 worth of diesel fuel. The same distance for a coal-burning train would have cost $255. It had been just 60 years since steam locomotives and the transcontinental railroad linked America’s coasts.
Zephyr’s engine used only $16.72 in diesel fuel.
The new diesel-electric engine technology had resulted from the U.S. Navy seeking a lighter weight, more powerful engine for its submarine fleet.
Learn more in Adding Wings to the Iron Horse.
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Recommended Reading: Careers in Geophysics
(2017); A Geophysicist’s Memoir: Searching for Oil on Six Continents
(2017); Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist
(1994); Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
(2004); Huntington Beach, California, Postcard History Series
(2009); Crayola Creators: Edward Binney and C. Harold Smith, Toy Trailblazers
(2016); Burlington’s Zephyrs, Great Passenger Trains
(2004). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.
_______________________
The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an annual AOGHS supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2024 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
