And Drake, who was looking for work, seemed like the ideal candidate. Eveleth, needed someone to travel back and forth inspecting their operations in rural Pennsylvania, where they collected oil from seeps. Rockefeller making vast fortunes in the oil business.Įdwin Drake had been born in 1819 in New York State, and as a young man had worked at various jobs before finding employment in 1850 as a railroad conductor.Īfter about seven years of working on the railroad he retired due to ill health.Ī chance encounter with two men who happened to be the founders of a new company, The Seneca Oil Company, led to a new career for Drake. The success of Drake’s well essentially created a new industry, and led to men such as John D. Someone had to find a way to extract oil from the ground.
And the main sources for oil at the time, whaling and collecting oil from seeps, couldn’t meet the demand. In the 1850s, new types of machinery being produced increasingly needed oil for lubrication. The problem with collecting oil in that manner was that even productive areas didn’t yield large amounts of oil.
Drake, a career railroad conductor who devised a way to drill a practical oil well.īefore Drake sank his first well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, people around the world had gathered oil for centuries around “seeps,” places where oil naturally rose to the surface and came out of the ground.
The history of the oil business as we know it began in 1859 in Pennsylvania, thanks to Edwin L.
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