STRIKING OIL
It was an American idea to "strike oil." Those who knew it as the "slime" of Genesis, or used it to stick together the bricks of the Tower of Babel, or knelt to it in the fire temples, were content to take it as it rose, the easy gift of nature, oozing forth on brook or spring. But the American struck it.
The world, going into partial eclipse on account of the failing supply of whale oil, had its lamps all ready for the new light, and industries beyond number needed only an expansion of the supply.
De Witt Clinton, with the same genius that gave us the Erie Canal, suggested as early as 1814 the use of petroleum for light. Reichenbach, the great German chemist, predicted in 1830 that petroleum would yield an illuminating oil equal to the finest. Inventors and money-makers kept up close with scientific investigators in France, Great Britain, and America.
As early as 1845 the manufacture of coal-oil, both for light and other purposes, had become important in France. Selligue had made himself master of the secrets of petroleum. His name, says one of his chroniclers, "must forever remain inseparably connected with that of the manufacture of light from oil, and to his researches few have been able to add."[40]
The name of this genius and benefactor of humanity has remained almost unknown, except within a small scientific world. He was a member of the French Academy, and almost every year between 1834 and 1848 he came to it with some new discovery. On one occasion he reminds his associates that he holds a patent, granted in 1832, for making illuminating oil from coal, and declares that the business can be developed to any extent which commerce or the arts may require. By 1845 he had unlocked nearly every one of the hidden places in which this extraordinary product has stored its wonders. He found out how to make illuminating oil, illuminating gas, lubricating oil, colors, paraffine for candles, fertilizers, solvents for resin for painters, healing washes, chemicals. He had three refineries in operation in the Department Saône-et-Loire, as described in the report of a committee of the French Academy in 1840. He exhibited his oils in the London Exhibition of 1851, and twelve years before, in the Parisian Industrial Exhibition of 1839, he had crude and refined oils and paraffine to show. "Among the most important objects of the exhibition," said its German historian, Von Hermann, "if they can be prepared economically." This Selligue accomplished. Between 1837 and 1843 he refined more than 4,000,000 pounds of oil, and 50 per cent. of his product was good illuminating oil.
Before 1850, the Scotch had succeeded in getting petroleum, called shale oil, out of bituminous coal, had found how to refine it, and had perfected lamps in which it would burn. Joshua Merrill, the pioneer of oil refining in this country, with his partners, successfully refined petroleum at Waltham, Mass., where they established themselves in 1853. The American manufacturers were making kerosene as early as 1856 from Scotch coal,[41] imported at a cost of $20 to $25 a ton, and getting experts like Silliman to analyze petroleum, in the hope that somehow a supply of it might be got. By 1860 there were sixty-four of these manufactories in the United States. "A crowd of obscure inventors," says Felix Foucon, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, "with unremitting labors perfected the lamp—when it was premature to dream that illumination by mineral oil should become universal." All was ready, as the eminent English geologist, Binney, said, "for the start of the vast American petroleum trade." It was not a lack of knowledge, but a lack of petroleum, that hampered the American manufacturer before 1860.[42] The market, the capital, the consumer, the skilled labor, the inventions, and science were all waiting for "Colonel" Drake.
With Drake's success in "striking oil" came to an end the period, lasting thousands of years, of fire temples, sweep and bucket, Seneca oil; and came to an end, also, the Arcadian simplicity of the old times—old though so recent—in which Professor Silliman could say, "It is not monopolized by any one, but is carried away freely by all who care to collect it."
The oil age begins characteristically. As soon as Drake's well had made known its precious contents, horses began running, and telegrams flying, and money passing to get possession of the oil lands for the few who knew from those who did not know. The primitive days when "it was not monopolized by any one" were over. Thousands of derricks rose all over the territory, and oil scouts pushed with their compasses through the forests of the wilderness in all directions. Wells were bored all over Europe, as well as America, wherever traces of oil showed themselves, sometimes so close together that when one was pumped it would suck air from the other.