William Maclure, who would become a renowned American geologist and “stratigrapher,” was born in Ayr, Scotland. He created the earliest geological maps of North America in 1809 and later earned the title “Father of American Geology.” (more…)
Shortages of equipment and drilling delays during World War I revealed the petroleum industry’s struggle with a lack of uniformity of pipe sizes, threads, and couplings. Founded in 1919, the American Petroleum Institute (API) gathered industry experts to come up with industry-wide standards to promote equipment compatibility. “After bringing these experts together to agree upon design and requirements, the first standard, Specifications for Steel and Iron Pipe for Oil Country Tubular Goods, was published on October 20, 1924,” notes API, which has since published more than 800 standards and guidelines. (more…)
Oklahoma independent producers established the Mid-Continent Oil & Gas Association in Tulsa, Oklahoma, six months after the United States entered World War I. The organization, today the United States Oil & Gas Association, was founded by petroleum industry leaders Frank Phillips, E.W. Marland, Bill Skelly, and Robert Kerr to increase petroleum supplies for the Allies during the war. The association in 1919 formed the Oklahoma-Kansas Division, now the Petroleum Alliance of Oklahoma. (more…)
A 900-foot-deep natural gas well in a cornfield near Kokomo, Indiana, led to the establishment of the Indiana Natural Gas Company, and in 1888, the Opalescent Glass Works, which has been in continuous operation since. The state’s first natural gas well was completed in 1867, seeking oil reserves (see Indiana Natural Gas Boom).
Opalescent Glass Works won a gold medal at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris for its “natural gas process” glass. Photo courtesy Kokomo Opalescent Glass.
Opalescent Glass Works, today Kokomo Opalescent Glass, almost went bankrupt when natural gas supplies dwindled, but in 1893 it recovered by selling electric insulators to Edison General Electric Company — and thousands of pounds of stained glass to Tiffany studios in New York City.
The first board of directors meeting of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) established the professional society in an expansion of the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers (AIME), which had created a Petroleum Division in 1922.
An American Institute of Mining Engineers program led to the Society of Petroleum Engineers.
AIME began in 1871, when a small group of Pennsylvania mining engineers sought to “preserve their collective knowledge and experiences for the benefit of future engineers.” SPE has grown into an independent, nonprofit global society with 132,000 members in 146 countries.
The wooden derrick and engine house of America’s first oil well erupted in flames along Oil Creek at Titusville, Pennsylvania. The well had been completed the previous August by Edwin L. Drake for George Bissell and the Seneca Oil Company of New Haven, Connecticut. Working with driller William “Uncle Billy” Smith, Drake used steam-powered cable-tool technology.
The first U.S. oil well fire began when Uncle Billy inspected a vat of oil with an open lamp. When the lamp’s flame set gases alight, the conflagration consumed the derrick, the stored oil, and the driller’s home. Drake and Seneca Oil Company would quickly rebuild at the already famous well site.
Learn more in First Oil Well Fire.
The Noble County Historical Society of Caldwell, Ohio, hosted a 200th anniversary festival and park dedication celebrating a brine well drilled with a spring pole that produced oil. The 1814 well can be found at Thorla McKee Park, named for Silas Thorla and Robert McKee, the entrepreneurs who established the local salt works, according to researcher Dave Baker in “Early Marietta.”
In 2015, Baker reported the historic well site included the remains of its original sycamore log casing beneath a replica springpole. Thoria and McKee separated the oil from the salt water by soaking it up with blankets before bottling it to sell as a medicinal potion. The remaining brine was boiled to extract the salt. In 1992, the Noble County Department of Tourism and the Ohio Historical Society dedicated a historic marker near the Caldwell site. Ohio’s first well drilled exclusively for oil was completed near Macksburg in the autumn of 1860.
An exploratory well drilled in a remote Wyoming valley opened the giant Elk Basin oilfield. Completed by the Midwest Refining Company near the Montana border, the wildcat well produced 150 barrels of high-grade “light oil” a day. The oil needed little refining to provide quality lubricants.
“Gusher coming in, south rim of the Elk Basin field, 1917.” Photo courtesy American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
Geologist George Ketchum first recognized the potential of the basin as a source of oil deposits. Ketchum had explored the remote area in 1906 with C.A. Fisher while farming near Cowley, Wyoming. The Elk Basin extended from Carbon County, Montana, into northeastern Park County, Wyoming.
Fisher was the first geologist to map sections of the Bighorn Basin southeast of Cody, Wyoming, where oil seeps had been found as early as 1883. The Wyoming oilfield discovery in unproven territory attracted new ventures like Elk Basin United Oil Company, investors, and oilfield service companies.
Learn more in First Wyoming Oil Wells.
Five thousand visitors attended the rainy opening day of the first International Petroleum Exposition and Congress in downtown Tulsa, an event that would return for almost six decades.
Although still a tourist attraction, the 76-foot-tall Golden Driller arrived decades after Tulsa’s first International Petroleum Exposition in 1923.
With annual attendance growing to more than 120,000, Mid-Continent Supply Company of Fort Worth introduced the original Golden Driller of Tulsa at the expo in 1953. Economic shocks beginning with the 1973 OPEC oil embargo depressed the industry, and after 57 years, the International Petroleum Exposition ended in 1979.
Sea Launch, a Boeing-led consortium of companies from the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Norway, launched its first commercial rocket using the Ocean Odyssey, a modified semi-submersible drilling platform. After a demonstration flight in March, a Russian Zenit-3SL rocket carried a DirecTV satellite to geostationary orbit.
Ocean Odyssey, a modified semi-submersible drilling platform, became the world’s first floating equatorial launch pad in 1999. Photo courtesy Sea Launch.
In 1988, the former drilling platform had been used by Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) for North Sea explorations. The Ocean Odyssey made 36 more rocket launches until 2014, when the consortium ended after Russia illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.
Learn more in Offshore Rocket Launcher.
A two-inch iron pipeline began transporting oil five miles through hilly terrain from a well at booming Pithole, Pennsylvania, to the Miller Farm Railroad Station at Oil Creek. With their livelihoods threatened, teamsters attempted to sabotage the pipeline until armed guards intervened. A second oil pipeline would begin operating in December.
Oil tanks at the boom town of Pithole, Pennsylvania, where Samuel Van Syckel built a five-mile pipeline in 1865. Photo courtesy Drake Well Museum.
Built by Samuel Van Syckel, who had formed the Oil Transportation Association, the pipeline used 15-foot welded joints. Three 10-horsepower Reed and Cogswell steam pumps pushed the oil at a rate of 81 barrels per hour. With up to 2,000 barrels of oil arriving daily at the terminal, more storage tanks were soon added. The pipeline transported the equivalent of 300 teamster wagons working for 10 hours.
“The day that the Van Syckel pipeline began to run oil a revolution began in the business,” proclaimed Ida Tarbell in her 1904 History of the Standard Oil Company. “After the Drake well, it is the most important event in the history of the Oil Regions.”
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Recommended Reading: The Extraction State, A History of Natural Gas in America (2021); Myth, Legend, Reality: Edwin Laurentine Drake and the Early Oil Industry
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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 © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
A bronze Tribute to the Roughnecks statue was dedicated near the Alamitos No. 1 well, which in 1921 revealed California’s prolific Long Beach oilfield 20 miles south of Los Angeles.
Signal Hill once had so many derricks people called it Porcupine Hill. The city of Long Beach is visible in the distance from the “Tribute to the Roughnecks” statue by Cindy Jackson.
The statue by Cindy Jackson has since commemorated the Signal Hill Oil Boom, serving as “a tribute to the petroleum pioneers for their success here, a success which has, by aiding in the growth and expansion of the petroleum industry, contributed so much to the welfare of mankind.”
The first production Ford Model T rolled off the assembly line in Detroit. Between 1908 and 1927, Ford built about 15 million more, each fueled by inexpensive gasoline. The popularity of the Model T was timely for the U.S. petroleum industry, which faced falling demand for kerosene as consumers switched to electric lighting.
Ford Model T tires were white until 1910, when the petroleum product carbon black was added to improve durability.
New major oilfield discoveries, especially the 1901 “Lucas Gusher” at Spindletop Hill near Beaumont, Texas, helped meet growing demand for what had been a refining byproduct, gasoline.
Manuel T. Gonzaullas joined the Texas Rangers — and rowdy Texas boom towns would never be the same. He soon became known as “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas.
“World’s Richest Acre Park, where once stood the world’s greatest concentration of oil wells.” A street scene in Kilgore, Texas, depicting steel derricks behind stores, is one of many by Russell Lee (1903-1986) preserved by the Library of Congress.
In East Texas, when the streets of downtown Kilgore sprouted oil derricks, the population grew from 700 to 10,000 in two weeks. With Depression-era petroleum discoveries multiplying, oil boom towns often attracted criminals. Riding a black stallion named Tony and sporting two pearl-handled .45 pistols, Gonzaullas soon earned a reputation for strictly enforcing the law.
The East Texas Salt Water Disposal Company drilled the first saltwater injection well in the 12-year-old East Texas oilfield near the towns of Tyler, Longview, and Kilgore. As early as 1929, the Federal Bureau of Mines had determined injecting recovered saltwater into formations could increase reservoir pressures and oil production.
Saltwater injection wells improve oil production and keep marginal East Texas wells viable. Illustration courtesy East Texas Salt Water Disposal Company.
The Texas Railroad Commission established the saltwater disposal company as a public utility to operate in the oilfield. The company treated and reinjected about 1.5 billion barrels of saltwater in its first 13 years, prompting the commission to proclaim saltwater injection as the “greatest oil conservation project in history.”
Skelly Oil Company incorporated in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with founder William Grove Skelly as president. He had been born in 1878 in Erie, Pennsylvania, where his father hauled oilfield equipment in a horse-drawn wagon.
Born near Pennsylvania oilfields, William Skelly founded Skelly Oil Company in 1919 — and led an international petroleum exposition for 32 years, helping to make Tulsa the “Oil Capital of the World.”
Skelly’s success in the El Dorado oilfield east of Wichita, Kansas, helped him launch Skelly Oil and other ventures, including Midland Refining Company, which he founded in 1917. As Tulsa promoted itself as “Oil Capital of the World,” Skelly became known as “Mr. Tulsa.”
Skelly served as president of Tulsa’s famous International Petroleum Exposition for 32 years until his death in 1957.
Ninety-five years ago, with a crowd of more than 4,000 expectant landowners, leaseholders, creditors, and others watching, the Daisy Bradford No. 3 wildcat well was successfully shot with nitroglycerin near Kilgore, Texas.
Spectators gathered on the widow Daisy Bradford’s farm near Kilgore, Texas, to watch the October 3, 1930, “shooting” of the discovery well of what proved to be the largest oilfield in the lower 48 states. Photo courtesy Jack Elder, The Glory Days.
“All of East Texas waited expectantly while Columbus ‘Dad’ Joiner inched his way toward oil,” explained historian Jack Elder in 1986. “Thousands crowded their way to the site of Daisy Bradford No. 3, hoping to be there when and if oil gushed from the well to wash away the misery of the Great Depression.”
Geologists were stunned when it became apparent the remote wildcat well on the widow Daisy Bradford’s farm — along with two other wells far to the north — were part of the same oil-producing formation (the Woodbine) that encompassed more than 140,000 acres. The “Black Giant” would produce billions of barrels of oil in coming decades.
Learn more in East Texas Oilfield Discovery.
Fifty years after the discovery of the East Texas oilfield, the East Texas Oil Museum at Kilgore College opened as “a tribute to the independent oil producers and wildcatters, the men and women who dared to dream as they pursued the fruits of free enterprise.”
The East Texas Oil Museum since 1980 has hosted events and maintained exhibits preserving the “Black Giant” oilfield discovered during the Great Depression. Photos by Bruce Wells.
Established with funding from the Hunt Oil Company, the museum at Kilgore College recreated a 1930s boom town atmosphere. The museum, which is hosting special events on its 45th birthday, maintains a database that offers keyword search and advanced search options — along with a “random Images” button to browse photography from a wide assortment of online records.
Just 15 miles east of Titusville, Pennsylvania, site of the first U.S. oil well, an oilfield discovery at Triumph Hill sparked another wild rush of speculators and new drilling. America’s petroleum industry was barely seven years old when wooden cable-tool derricks and engine houses replaced hemlock trees along the Allegheny River.
More than 2,500 people, including his widow, Laura Dowd Drake, attended the unveiling of a monument to the “father of the petroleum industry,” Edwin L. Drake, who had died in relative obscurity in 1880. Standard Oil Company executive Henry Rogers commissioned the marble, semi-circle memorial in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
Unveiling of the Drake Monument in Titusville, Pennsylvania, on October 4,1901. Thousands attended the dedication in Woodlawn Cemetery. Photo by John Mather courtesy Drake Well Museum.
The monument, which includes a bronze statue by Charles Henry Niehaus, was dedicated in Woodlawn Cemetery. Learn more by visiting Titusville’s Drake Well Museum and Park.
Using the new earth science of petroleum geology for finding oil led to the discovery of the giant Mid-Continent field in central Kansas. Drilled by Wichita Natural Gas Company, a subsidiary of Cities Service Company, the well revealed the 34-square-mile El Dorado oilfield.
The Stapleton No. 1 well in 1915 revealed the El Dorado, Kansas, oilfield, among the largest in the world. By 1919, Butler County had more than 1,800 producing oil wells. Photo by Bruce Wells.
“Pioneers named El Dorado, Kansas, in 1857 for the beauty of the site and the promise of future riches, but not until 58 years later was black rather than mythical yellow gold discovered when the Stapleton No. 1 oil well came in on October 5, 1915,” explained geologist Lawrence Skelton in 1997.
The Stapleton No. 1 well east of Wichita initially found oil at a depth of 600 feet before being deepened to 2,500 feet to produce 110 barrels of oil a day from the Wilcox sands. Natural gas discoveries one year earlier at nearby Augusta had prompted El Dorado civic leaders to seek their own geological study of Mid-Continent fields.
The Stapleton No. 1 well and the Kansas Oil Museum preserve a 1915 oil discovery. Photo by Bruce Wells.
The Kansas Oil Museum preserves the state’s petroleum heritage with historic oilfield equipment displayed on 10 acres east of the city. Museum exhibits describe how lessons from the El Dorado field helped launch petroleum geology as a profession while establishing El Dorado as a center for refining.
Learn more in the Kansas Oil Boom.
A water park inside a Depression-era experimental concrete oil tank opened to the public in West Texas. The day’s festivities at Monahans attracted swimmers, boaters, anglers, and even water skiers to the massive, manmade lake — before leaks at the seams forced it to close the next day.
The Million Barrel Museum’s site was originally built to store Permian Basin oil. For scale, note the railroad car and caboose exhibit at upper right.
A local couple had attempted to find a good use for the 525-foot by 422-foot “million barrel reservoir” once covered by a redwood dome roof. The concrete tank had been completed in 1928 by Shell Oil due to a lack of pipelines for Permian Basin oil. Shell stopped using the tank because the company could not prevent oil from leaking at the seams.
Learn more in Million Barrel Museum.
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Recommended Reading: Signal Hill, California – Images of America
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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 © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
