Abstract

Many assume that the petroleum industry sprang into being that fateful Sunday morning, August 28th, 1859, when “Uncle Billy” Smith checked on a well he and his sons were drilling under the direction of Colonel Edwin L. Drake near Titusville, Pennsylvania, and found the hole was filled with oil. However, nothing could be farther from the truth, for natural hydrocarbons, in one form or another, had been used and exploited for many thousands of years before the Drake well placed oil very much in the limelight. Some of the oldest cities on earth, built at least 5000 years ago, have a petroleum-derived mortar between the building bricks. Herodotus (500 BCE) left records of oil wells at Zante. The Old Testament of the Bible tells of Moses’ basket being sealed with pitch so it would not leak and stay afloat long enough to be found by the pharaoh’s wife, and certainly Noah used a “pitch” sealant to stop leaks in his ark.

The people of the far east and middle east appear to have made the greatest use of petroleum, albeit primarily as a weapon of war. As early as the Fourth Century (BCE) the Chinese had a highly developed drilling technology and there are records of bore holes and brine wells which reached depths of over 1500 feet (500 meters) more than 2500 years ago. They developed what is probably the first petroleum industry that included pipelines and sea going tankers long before the emergence of European civilizations. Even in North America the native peoples made use of natural oil seeps, especially in what is now New York state and western Pennsylvania, many years before Columbus arrived in the New World. And wells were both drilled and dug which yielded natural gas and petroleum in Canada and the United States before Drake’s chance discovery. Thus, we humans and petroleum had a long and rich history before the modern industry was born with the discovery near Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859.