After years of growth thanks to discoveries at Spindletop and Sour Lake, the Texas Corporation was incorporated, acquiring all of the outstanding stock of the Texas Company, which was dissolved the next year. (more…)
President George H.W. Bush signed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which was passed by the 101st Congress to strengthen the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to prevent and respond to catastrophic oil spills. Signed into law 17 months after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, the act required vessels and oil storage facilities to submit to the federal government plans detailing how they would respond to large spills. (more…)
The discovery well of the Sistersville oilfield brought great wealth to a small West Virginian town on the Ohio River north of Parkersburg and Burning Springs (see Confederates attack Oilfield). “The bringing in of the ‘Pole Cat’ well, which pumped water for a year before it pumped oil, brought in a sudden influx of oil men, drillers, leasers, speculators, followers, floaters, wildcatters, and hangers-on,” a local historian noted.
Bird’s-eye-view artist Thaddeus M. Fowler created maps of prospering towns and cities during the Industrial Revolution, including many oil boom towns like his 1896 lithograph of Sistersville, West Virginia. Map courtesy Library of Congress.
The petroleum wealth changed Sistersville from a rural village of 300 people “to a rip-roaring” metropolis of 15,000 people almost overnight. At the height of its petroleum prosperity, cartographic artist Thaddeus M. Fowler of Massachusetts illustrated Sistersville in one of his popular “bird’s eye” maps (see Oil Town “Aero Views”).
2025 West Virginia Oil & Gas Festival Queen Haley Spencer receives her crown from Mia Grace Bailey. Photo courtesy Tyler Star News.
On September 11, 2025, Tyler County’s Ohio River community will host its three-day celebration of the 1891 Pole Cat well (later renamed the Sistersville well). Events at Sistersville City Park will include the Gib Morgan Wrench Throwing Contest and other oilfield-related events hosted by 57th West Virginia Oil and Gas Festival Queen Haley Spencer, crowned in July at the Tyler Consolidated High School Auditorium.
Amoco announced plans to merge with London-based British Petroleum Company in a stock swap valued at about $48 billion — then the world’s largest industrial merger. Amoco began in 1889 as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company of Indiana. The company officially changed its name to Amoco in 1985.
BP closed all of its Amoco stations in 2001.
Finalized on December 31, the combined company, BP Amoco PLC, became 60 percent owned by BP shareholders, marking the transaction as the largest foreign takeover of an American company. Originally named the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1935, British Petroleum in 2000 rebranded into BP and announced the closure or renaming of its Amoco stations.
Thirty-nine-year-old Bertha Benz made history when she became the first person to make a long-distance trip by automobile. Her adventure also included “the first road repairs, the first automotive marketing stunt, the first case of a wife borrowing her husband’s car without asking, and the first violation of intercity highway laws in a motor vehicle,” proclaimed a 2018 article in Wired.
Bertha Benz became the world’s first female automotive pioneer in 1888. Image courtesy Mercedes-Benz Museum.
Bertha drove away in the “Patent Motorwagen” (after leaving a note to her husband) and took their two sons, Eugen, 15, and Richard, 13, to visit her mother in Pforzheim, according to Wired. The trip from Mannheim covered about about 60 miles. “She knew she’d need help, because the 0.88-horsepower engine was a little underpowered, to say the least, and would need to be pushed up some of the steeper hills.”
The 15-hour drive — today the Bertha Benz Memorial Route — helped popularize Karl Benz’s invention. By the end of the century, Mercedes-Benz was the largest car company in the world. The Automotive Hall of Fame inducted Bertha as the first female automotive pioneer in 2016.
Learn more in First Car, First Road Trip.
Eastern Kentucky independent producers joined the Western Kentucky Oil Men’s Association to create a state-wide organization in Frankfort — today’s Kentucky Oil and Gas Association (KOGA). A 1919 oil discovery in Hancock County had launched the petroleum industry in western Kentucky, where commercial amounts of oil had been found as early as 1829 near Burkesville while drilling for brine with a spring-pole (also see Kentucky’s Great American Well).
The Oil and Gas Journal promoted itself with an illustration from artist Norman Rockwell in an ad captioned, “Where Oil Men Invest Their Valuable Reading Time.” Rockwell’s renditions of American life brought him popularity through magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Boy’s Life, and Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly.
A Norman Rockwell illustration advertised the Oil and Gas Journal, a weekly trade magazine, “Where Oil Men Invest Their Valuable Reading Time.”
In addition to the illustrations for the Oil and Gas Journal, Rockwell in 1959 provided artwork to the American Petroleum Institute (API), which sponsored a U.S. Postal Service “first day of issue” commemorating the 1959 centennial of the birth of the U.S. oil industry (see Centennial Oil Stamp Issue).
The illustration included the slogan “Oil’s First Century 1859-1959, Born in Freedom Working for Progress.”
Norman Rockwell’s art commemorated the 1959 centennial of the birth of the nation’s oil industry.
Rockwell’s drawing depicted “the men of science, the rugged extraction of the crude oil, and ending with your friendly service station attendant,” according to a collector.
The original headquarters of the Union Oil Company in Santa Paula, California — constructed in 1890 and an oil museum since 1950 — was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Today, the California Oil Museum on 1001 East Main Street includes renovated Union Oil offices on the second floor, above the former Santa Paula Hardware Company and Post Office. Union Oil moved its headquarters to Los Angeles in 1901.
The headquarters of the Union Oil Company of California, founded in Santa Paula in 1890, occupied the second floor; a hardware store and post office were located on the first floor. Chevron donated the building to the city in 2024. Photo courtesy Chevron.
Also designated a Ventura County Cultural Heritage Landmark, the California Oil Museum exhibits working oilfield models, a 19th-century cable-tool drilling rig, Union Oil gas station memorabilia, and an Energy Education Lab with STEM activities for students.
One day after President Harry Truman announced World War II was over, gasoline rationing ended in America. Food rationing had begun in early 1942 with rubber and gasoline added in December by the Office of Price Administration. Most civilian drivers received a windshield sticker with ration coupons for gasoline, limiting purchases to four gallons a week. A ration book “B” sticker allowed business owners up to eight gallons a week.
World War II gasoline ration stamps and mileage card, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, courtesy Henry Ford Museum.
According to the National World War Two Museum, a “C” sticker was for people with professional occupations, an “M” sticker for motorcycles, and a “T” sticker for truck drivers. A 35 mph speed limit was established for the duration of the war. By the end of 1945, sugar remained the only commodity still being rationed.
What would become the oldest continuously producing oil well was completed near Oil Creek at Oil City, Pennsylvania. The McClintock No. 1 well initially produced 50 barrels of oil a day from a depth of 620 feet. The well, completed 14 miles from the first U.S. oil discovery two years earlier, has produced continuously at its original depth, according to the Oil Region Alliance.
A “Rock Oil Tour” of energy economists from Washington D.C, in 2009 included a stop at the 1861 McClintock well, today pumped a few times a year to supply souvenir bottles sold at the Drake Well Museum in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Photo by Bruce Wells.
Donated by Quaker State in 1995 after the company announced the move of its headquarters from Oil City to Dallas, the McClintock well has pumped monthly to produce up to 10 barrels of oil. Souvenir bottles of the oil today are sold in the Titusville gift shop of the Drake Well Museum.
A historic marker on Route 8 south of Rouseville identifies the record-setting McClintock well, but thousands pass by each year without knowing it’s there. Across the railroad, about 240 yards away, another historic marker commemorates an early oilfield tragedy — the Rouseville 1861 oil well fire.
With a crowd of 50,000 cheering them on, eight monoplanes took off from an airfield in Oakland, California, in an air race over the Pacific. Dole Pineapple Company offered a $25,000 prize to the first plane to reach Honolulu, 2,400 miles away. Three months earlier, Charles Lindbergh had made the first solo trans-Atlantic flight of 1,500 miles.
Several competitors disappeared over the Pacific during the 1927 Dole air race. The winning aircraft today is on display at the Woolaroc Ranch near Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
A new aviation fuel developed by Phillips Petroleum — Nu-Aviation Gasoline — powered the winning “Woolaroc” monoplane for the deadly air race (two of the fuel-heavy planes crashed on takeoff, others were lost in flight). Woolaroc was named for Frank Phillips’ Bartlesville ranch and nature preserve.
Learn more in Flight of the Woolaroc.
Two years after the end of the Revolutionary War, oil was reported floating on a creek in northwestern Pennsylvania. “Oil Creek has taken its name from an oil or bituminous matter being found floating on its surface,” noted a report by Gen. William Irvine. “Many cures are attributed to this oil by the natives, and lately by some of the whites, particularly rheumatic pains and old ulcers,” Gen. Irvine wrote.
The discovery confirmed an earlier Army survey reporting that Oil Creek “empties itself into the Allegheny River, issuing from a spring, on the top of which floats an oil, similar to what is called Barbados Tar (see Asphalt Paves the Way), and from which may be collected by one man several gallons in a day.” Decades later, George Bissell studied the seeps, which led to drilling of the first U.S. oil well there in 1859.
Charles Kettering of Dayton, Ohio, patented an “engine-starting device,” the first practical electric starter for automobiles. Working as an engineer for Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO), Kettering had earlier devised an electric motor to replace hand cranks on cash registers. “The present invention is particularly applicable to automobiles, wherein an engine of the combustion or explosion type is employed, as a means of propulsion,” Kettering noted in his patent.
In addition to his engine-starting patent, in 1921 Kettering and fellow General Motors chemist Thomas Midgley Jr. discovered the gasoline additive tetraethyl lead (see Ethyl Anti-Knock Gas). Cadillac was the first manufacturer to add electric starters to its models. The Ford Model T used a hand crank until 1919; replacing the dangerous method proved popular, especially among women drivers.
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Recommended Reading: Where it All Began: The story of the people and places where the oil & gas industry began: West Virginia and southeastern Ohio
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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. © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
The Crystal Oil Company completed its Wirt Franklin No. 1 well 20 miles northwest of Ardmore, Oklahoma. The wildcat well revealed the giant Healdton field, which became known as “the poor man’s field” because of its shallow depth and low cost of drilling. The area attracted many independent producers with limited financial backing.
Healdton Oil Museum exhibits include the 1920 Pierce-Arrow owned by Wirt Franklin, who in 1929 founded a national trade association of independent oil and natural gas producers.
Another oil discovery in 1919 revealed the Hewitt field, which extended production 22 miles across Carter County. The Greater Healdton-Hewitt oilfield produced “an astounding 320,753,000 barrels of crude by the close of the first half of the 20th century,” noted Kenny Franks in his 1989 book, Ragtown: A History of the Greater Healdton-Hewitt Oil Field.
A young Erle P. Halliburton perfected a new method of cementing oil wells in “the poor man’s field” (see Halliburton and the Healdton Oilfield). Wirt Franklin of Ardmore became the first president of the then Tulsa-based Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) in 1929.
President Jimmy Carter signed the Department of Energy Organization Act, establishing the twelfth cabinet-level department by consolidating a dozen federal agencies and energy programs. The Act combined the Federal Energy Administration and the Energy Research and Development Administration, making the new Department of Energy (DOE) responsible for nuclear weapon programs and national labs. James Schlesinger was sworn in as the first Secretary of Energy.
Twelve years after launching Standard Oil Company of Ohio (bp America), John D. Rockefeller founded the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (ExxonMobil) as a refining and marketing arm of the Standard Oil Trust, which would reorganize as Standard Oil Interests in 1892, two years after the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
“Taking advantage of New Jersey laws that allowed corporations to own stock in other corporations, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey became a holding company that effectively replaced the Standard Oil Trust. In this capacity, it provided administrative coordination to Standard Oil Interests and held stock in forty-one other oil companies,” notes the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1911 ordered Standard Oil of New Jersey to separate from its subsidiaries.
Although the comic strip “Alley Oop” began syndication with the Newspaper Enterprise Association, the caveman character began in Permian Basin oilfields of the 1920s. A small, West Texas oil town would proclaim itself the inspiration for cartoonist Victor Hamlin.
A 1995 stamp commemorated “Alley Oop” by Victor Hamlin, who once worked in oilfields at Yates, Texas.
Iraan (pronounced eye-rah-ann) began as a company town following the October 1926 discovery of the giant Yates oilfield. The town’s name combined the names of Ira and Ann Yates. As petroleum drilling in the Permian Basin boomed, future Alley Oop cartoonist Hamlin worked as an oil company cartographer. He developed a lifelong interest in geology and paleontology that helped inspire his popular Depression Era comic strip.
Learn more in Alley Oop’s Oil Roots.
The Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act designated the Secretary of the Interior responsible for the administration of mineral exploration and development of America’s outer continental shelf. Forty-four Gulf of Mexico wells were already operating in 11 oilfields by 1949. As the offshore industry evolved in the 1950s, petroleum production became the second-largest revenue generator for the country, after income taxes.
Since 1982, the Interior Department has disbursed more than $387 billion in mineral leasing revenues. The Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR ) in 2024 reported a disbursement of $16.45 billion (down from $18.24 billion in 2023) generated from energy production on federal and Tribal lands and federal offshore areas. Monthly disbursements came from the royalties, rents, and bonuses collected from energy and mineral companies operating on federal lands and waters.
Famed oilfield well control expert and firefighter Paul “Red” Adair died at age 89 in Houston. The son of a blacksmith, Adair was born in 1915 in Houston. He served with a U.S. Army bomb disposal unit during World War II.
Famed oilfield firefighter Paul “Red” Adair of Houston, Texas, in 1964.
Adair had begun his oilfield career working for Myron Macy Kinley, who patented a technology for using charges of high explosives to snuff out well fires. Kinley, whose father had been an oil well shooter in California in the early 1900s, mentored many other firefighters, including Asger “Boots” Hansen and Edward “Coots” Mathews (Boots & Coots International Well Control).
After founding the Red Adair Company in 1959, Adair developed new techniques as his company extinguished over 2,000 well fires worldwide, onshore and offshore. The oilfield firefighter’s skills, dramatized in the 1968 film “Hellfighters,” were put to the test in 1991, when his company extinguished 117 well fires set in Kuwait by the retreating Iraqi army. Innovative oilfield firefighting technologies began as early as the 1860s.
A team led by University of Oklahoma geophysicist John C. Karcher conducted the world’s first reflection seismograph measurement of a geologic formation, pioneering the use of reflection seismic technology. The geological section measurement followed limited tests in June and July at Oklahoma City. His work led to the discovery of many of the world’s largest oil and natural gas fields.
A roadside sign on I-35 south of Oklahoma City includes a geologic illustration of the Arbuckle Anticline. A nearby marker describes how using reflection seismography for oil exploration began here. Photo by Bruce Wells.
The new geophysical method recorded reflected seismic waves as they traveled through the earth, helping to define oil-bearing formations. The Arbuckle Mountains of Oklahoma were selected for testing the technique and new equipment, according to a roadside marker at the site south of Oklahoma City on I-35.
Learn More in Exploring Seismic Waves.
After drilling six dry holes near Luling, Texas, the United North & South Oil Company completed its Rafael Rios No. 1 well. Company President Edgar B. Davis remained determined to find oil in the Austin chalk geologic formation. His perseverance paid off with an oilfield 12 miles long and two miles wide. The Luling field annually produced 11 million barrels of oil by 1924.
The Luling Oil Museum in central Texas is in a restored 1885 mercantile store near the 1922 oilfield a psychic claimed to help discover. Photo courtesy Luling Oil Museum.
On June 11, 1926, Davis sold his Luling leases to the Magnolia Petroleum Company for $12 million – the largest petroleum deal in Texas at the time. Success also produced local tales of Davis finding the Luling oilfield after consulting a psychic. Self-proclaimed clairvoyant Edgar Cayce reported he had helped Davis, but the psychic formed an exploration company that failed after drilling dry holes.
Learn more in Luling Oil Museum and Crudoleum.
An oilfield discovery in western Nebraska ended decades of unsuccessful searching and helped start the state’s modern petroleum industry. The Marathon Oil Company Mary Egging No. 1 well, five miles southeast of the town of Gurley, produced 225 barrels of oil per day from a depth of 4,429 feet.
According to a nearby historical marker, the first exploratory well drilled in the area near Harrisburg failed in 1917. The success in western Nebraska came nine years after the first Nebraska oil well was completed in 1940 in the southeastern corner of the state.
Marathon Oil in May 2024 announced it was being acquired by ConocoPhillips in an all-stock transaction valued at $22.5 billion.
“Fishtail” drill bits became obsolete after Howard Hughes Sr. of Houston, Texas, patented the dual-cone roller bit with two rotating cones. By pulverizing hard rock, his bit led to faster and deeper rotary drilling. A few months before receiving the 1909 drill patent, Hughes and Walter Sharp established the manufacturing company Sharp-Hughes Tool (see Carl Baker and Howard Hughes).
Howard Hughes Sr. of Houston, Texas, received a 1909 patent for “roller drills such as are used for drilling holes in earth and rock.”
“Instead of scraping the rock, as does the fishtail bit, the Hughes bit, with its two conical cutters, took a different engineering approach,” reported the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). “By chipping, crushing, and powdering hard rock formations, the Hughes Two-Cone Drill Bit could reach vast amounts of oil in reservoirs thousands of feet below the surface. This new drilling technology would revolutionize the industry.”
In 1933, Hughes engineers invented the modern tri-cone bit; Frank and George Christensen developed the earliest diamond bit in 1941; and tungsten-carbide bits arrived in the early 1950s. By the 1970s, synthetic diamonds evolved into the polycrystalline diamond compact bit. ASME in 2009 designated the Hughes two-cone drill bit a Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark (no. 246).
Learn more in Making Hole – Drilling Technology.
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Recommended Reading: Ragtown: A History of the Greater Healdton-Hewitt Oil Field
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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. © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
The National Oil Scouts Association of America, later the International Oil Scouts Association (IOSA), filed its charter in Austin, Texas, bringing new standards to an important oilfield profession. Since the 1860s, oilfield scouts have gathered field intelligence on drilling operations, including often sensitive information about the operator, well location and lease details — anything that may yield a competitive advantage. These “night riders of the hemlocks” also sleuth drilling depths, geologic formations encountered, logs, and other data.
Learn more in Oil Scouts – Oil Patch Detectives.
Manufacturer of oilfield products since 1932, the Zero Hour Bomb Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma, received its last U.S. patent relating to electric timer explosives for fracturing geologic formations. The service company patented its device for positioning blasting cartridges in wells — a “well bridge” that automatically opened, “when the time bomb or weight reached a position at the bottom of the well.”
Oilfield service provider Zero Hour Bomb Company was founded in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1932. Photos courtesy Zebco.
The downhole apparatus was never built, because company executives already were manufacturing and marketing a new, “cannot backlash” fishing reel invented by Jasper “R.D.” Hull, who they had hired in 1947. Zero Hour Bomb Company changed its name to Zebco in 1956.
Learn more in Zebco Reel Oilfield History.
The first barrel of oil from the North Slope’s Prudhoe Bay oilfield arrived at the Port of Valdez after an 800-mile journey through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.
The Trans-Alaska Pipeline delivered North Slope oil almost a decade after the Prudhoe Bay field’s discovery. OMAR refers to the Organization for Management of Alaska’s Resources, now the Resource Development Council for Alaska.
At peak flow in 1988, 11 pumping stations moved 2.1 million barrels of oil a day. The 48-inch-wide pipeline has been recognized as a landmark of engineering (see Trans-Alaska Pipeline History).
Less than a year after the “Roaring Ranger” discovered an oilfield to the south, the Fowler No. 1 well at the cotton farming community of Burkburnett, Texas, revealed a new giant field at a depth of 1,734 feet. Within three weeks, 56 rigs were drilling near the Fowler Farm Oil Company site along the Red River in North Texas.
Circa 1919 photo captioned, “Burkburnett, Texas, the World’s Wonder Oil Pool,” showing eight months’ phenomenal development, viewed from the northwest side, opposite Fowler farm.” A. Newman Photographic Company photo courtesy Library of Congress.
Fowler’s decision to drill a well on his Wichita County farm had been called “Fowler’s Folly” until his oil discovery brought hundreds of oil companies to the county. By January 1919, Burkburnett’s population reached more than 8,000 people — with a line of derricks two miles long greeting new arrivals.
As the “World’s Wonder Oil Pool” made national headlines, teenager Clark Gable was a 17-year-old roustabout working in Oklahoma. Gable and Spencer Tracy would star in Hollywood’s version of Burkburnett oil history, the popular 1940 movie “Boom Town.”
Learn more in Boom Town Burkburnett.
As America’s reliance on foreign oil continued to grow — discouraging domestic production — President Dwight D. Eisenhower established a Voluntary Oil Import Program with import quotas by region. The intent was to ensure adequate domestic petroleum in case of a national emergency.
Using a presidential proclamation two years later, Eisenhower made the program mandatory. By 1962, oil imports were limited to 12.2 percent of U.S. production. The program continued until suspended by President Richard Nixon in 1973 as domestic oil production reached new highs during the OPEC oil embargo.
A Navy patrol boat attacked and sank a German U-boat in the Gulf of Mexico after the submarine had torpedoed a U.S. freighter. Despite being depth-charged, the U-166 was believed to have escaped — until a natural gas pipeline survey revealed it 59 years later.
The U-166’s identity was not learned until advanced geophysical survey technologies arrived in 2001, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The discovery resulted from an archaeological survey prior to construction of a natural gas pipeline by the British company BP and Shell Offshore Inc.
A natural gas pipeline survey revealed the U-166 about 45 miles off the Louisiana coast in 2011.
Remotely operating vehicles (ROVs) and an autonomous side-scan sonar revealed U-166 separated from its last victim, the Robert E. Lee, by less than a mile. BP and Shell altered their proposed pipeline to preserve the site.
With the petroleum industry the principal user of advanced underwater technologies for seafloor mapping, other World War II vessels have been discovered during oil and natural gas surveys.
Learn more in Petroleum Survey discovers U-boat.
The first large-scale delivery of natural gas by pipeline began when gas was piped to more than 250 residential and commercial customers in Titusville, Pennsylvania, home of America’s first oil well, drilled in 1859. An iron pipeline two inches wide carried the natural gas five miles from a well producing four million cubic feet of gas a day.
Investors, including the mayor of Titusville, had formed the Keystone Gas & Water Company to construct the pipeline and deliver “the most powerful and voluminous gas well on record.” The well produced into the 1880s, according to the Drake Well Museum and Park.
Missouri became the first state to award a contract with interstate construction funding authorized two months earlier by the Federal-Aid Highway Act. The highway commission agreed to begin work on part of Route 66, now Interstate 44.
Missouri launched the U.S. interstate system after “inking a deal for work on U.S. Route 66.” Today, I-44 stretches across south central Missouri and is a major corridor linking the Midwest and the West Coast.
“There is no question that the creation of the interstate highway system has been the most significant development in the history of transportation in the United States,” proclaimed the Missouri Department of Transportation (also see America on the Move).
A Spanish expedition discovered what would be called La Brea (the tar) pits on the West Coast. “We debated whether this substance, which flows melted from underneath the earth, could occasion so many earthquakes,” noted the expedition’s Franciscan friar in his diary.
The Page Museum of Los Angeles offers life-size replicas of extinct mammals at the Rancho La Brea in Hancock Park. Although called the “tar pits,” the pools are asphalt.
The friar, Juan Crespi, was the first person to use the term “bitumen” in describing these sticky pools in southern California — where crude oil has been seeping from the ground through fissures in the coastal plain sediments for more than 40,000 years. Native Americans used the substance for centuries to waterproof baskets and caulk canoes.
Sticky pools form when crude oil seeps to the surface through fissures in the earth’s crust.
Although popularly called the tar pits, the pools at Rancho La Brea are actually asphalt — not tar, which is a by-product made by the distillation of woody materials, such as peat. Asphalt is a naturally formed substance comprised of hydrocarbon molecules (see Asphalt Paves the Way).
Learn more in Discovering the Le Brea Tar Pits.
War Emergency Pipelines Inc. began construction on the “Big Inch” line — the longest petroleum pipeline project ever undertaken in the United States. Conceived to supply wartime fuel demands — and in response to U-boat attacks on oil tankers along the eastern seaboard and Gulf of Mexico, the “Big Inch” and “Little Big Inch” lines were extolled as “the most amazing government-industry cooperation ever achieved.”
The longest petroleum pipeline project ever undertaken led to construction of a 24-inch pipeline from East Texas to Illinois, and a 20-inch line as far as New York City.
With a goal of transporting 300,000 barrels of oil per day, the $95 million project called for construction of a 24-inch pipeline (Big Inch) from East Texas to Illinois, and a 20-inch line (Little Big Inch) as far as New York and Philadelphia. The pipelines would reach more than 1,200 miles (the Trans-Alaska pipeline system is 800 miles long).
Learn more in Big Inch Pipelines of WWII.
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Recommended Reading: The Oil Scouts – Reminiscences of the Night Riders of the Hemlocks
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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.
Glenn H. McCarthy struck oil 50 miles east of Houston in 1935, extending the already prolific Anahuac field. The well was the first of many for the Texas independent producer who would discover 11 Texas oilfields by 1945.
McCarthy became known as another “King of the Wildcatters” and “Diamond Glenn” by 1950, when his estimated worth reached $200 million ($2 billion today).
TIME magazine in 1950 featured Texas wildcatter Glenn McCarthy of Houston.
In addition to his McCarthy Oil and Gas Company, McCarthy eventually owned a gas company, a chemical company, a radio station, 14 newspapers, a magazine, two banks, and the Shell Building in Houston. In the late 1940s, he invested $21 million to build the 18-story, 1,100-room Shamrock Hotel — and reportedly spent $1 million on its St. Patrick’s Day 1949 opening gala, which newspapers dubbed “Houston’s biggest party.”
Learn more in “Diamond Glenn” McCarthy.
Before 50,000 cheering New York City onlookers, former roughneck Wiley Post landed his Lockheed 5C Vega “Winnie Mae,” becoming the first person to fly solo around the world. Post had worked in oilfields near Walters, Oklahoma, when he took his first airplane ride with a barnstormer in 1919 and was inspired to take lessons.
Thanks to a friendship with Frank Phillips, Wiley Post set altitude records and became the first person to fly solo around the world.
In 1926, on the first day of working at a well near Seminole, a metal splinter severely damaged his left eye, causing loss of sight. Post used the $1,700 in compensation to buy his first airplane. He became friends with Frank Phillips, president of Phillips Petroleum, sponsor of several high-altitude experimental flights. Phillips also sponsored the “Woolaroc” — winning plane of an August 1926 air race across the Pacific.
The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission dedicated a state marker to commemorate the man who drilled for oil just a few days after Edwin Drake completed the first U.S. commercial well on August 27, 1859. “After Drake’s discovery of oil in Titusville, some area residents attempted to sink their own well,” noted historians at Explore Pennsylvania. “The vast majority of such efforts failed.”
Pennsylvania historical marker for the 1859 Grandin well — America’s second oil well, which was a dry hole.
Using a simple spring pole, 22-year-old John Grandin and a local blacksmith began to “kick down” a well that would reach almost twice as deep as Drake’s cable-tool depth of 69.5 feet. Despite not finding the oil-producing formation (the Venango Sands), Grandin’s well produced several “firsts” for the young U.S. petroleum industry.
Learn more in First Dry Hole.
Using petroleum for improving the performance of locomotives became widespread when Elijah McCoy patented an automatic lubricator for steam engines. McCoy designed a device that applied oil through a drip cup to locomotive and ship steam engines. Instead of stopping engines to apply necessary lubrication, McCoy’s device provided it while they ran, saving railroads time and money.
Elijah McCoy invented lubrication systems for steam engines, early beneficiaries of petroleum. Awarded more than 60 patents, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2001.
The Canadian-born McCoy was the son of slaves who had escaped Kentucky. After his family settled in Michigan, 15-year-old McCoy traveled to Scotland to study mechanical engineering. By the time he died in 1929, the inventor had received 60 patents, according to a 1994 Michigan historical marker.
The expression “the real McCoy” reportedly came from railroad engineers not wanting to buy low-quality copycats of his popular device. Before purchasing the lubricator, buyers would ask if it was “the real McCoy.”
After a secretary at Humble Oil and Refining Company organized the first club in New Orleans, the Association of Desk & Derrick Clubs (ADDC) of North America officially began with articles of association signed by the presidents of clubs in Jackson, Mississippi, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Houston. By 1952, representatives from 40 clubs would attend the first ADDC convention, held at Houston’s Shamrock Hotel.
Learn more in Desk and Derrick Educators.
BP — the official name of a group of companies including Amoco, ARCO and Castrol — unveiled a new corporate identity brand, replacing the “Green Shield” logo with a green and yellow sunflower pattern.
The company also introduced a new corporate slogan: “Beyond Petroleum.” When BP — then British Petroleum — merged with Amoco in 1998, the company’s name briefly changed to BP Amoco before all stations converted to the BP brand.
The first documented report of oil in the New World resulted when a storm forced Spanish explorer Don Luis de Moscoso to land two of his brigantines at the mouth of the Sabine River. He had succeeded expedition leader Hernando de Soto and built seven of the small vessels to sail down the newly discovered Mississippi River and westward along the Gulf Coast.
Spanish explorers used brigantines to sail along the Gulf Coast in 1543.
According to an account of the expedition, Indians knew of the future Texas’ natural seeps. “There was found a skumme, which they call Copee, which the Sea casteth up, and it is like Pitch, wherewith in some places, where Pitch is wanting, they pitch their ships; there they pitched their Brigandines.”
Learn more about the first reports of oil worldwide in Earliest Signs of Oil.
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 and carried oil in six center and two wing compartments, “oil-proofed by a special process,” according to the journal Cement and Engineering News.
Socony, the first concrete oil tanker, launched in 1918. Below is a second version of the oil barge.
“Eight-inch cast iron pipe lines lead to each compartment and the oil pump is located on a concrete pump room aft,” the journal explained. Steel shortages during World War II would lead to the construction of larger reinforced concrete oil tankers.
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Recommended Reading: The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
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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. © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
