The pretty town of Fredonia, in New York state, three miles from Lake Erie and forty-five south-west of Buffalo, enjoys the distinction of first using natural-gas for illuminating purposes. It is a beautiful place, famous for fine roads, fine scenery and fine vineyards. Canodonay Creek, a small but rapid stream, passes through it to the lake. Opinions vary as to the exact date when the gas was utilized, some authorities making it 1821, others 1824 and a few 1829. The best information fixes it at 1824, when workmen, in tearing down an old mill, observed bubbles on the water that proved to be inflammable. The hint was not lost. A company bored a hole one-inch-and-a-half in diameter into the limestone-rock. The gas left its regular channel, climbed the hole, lighted a new mill and was piped to a hundred houses in the village at a cost of one-fifty a year for each. The flame was large and strong and for years Fredonia was the only town in America lighted by “nature-gas.” A gasometer was constructed, which collected eighty-eight cubic feet in twelve hours. The inhabitants didn’t keep late hours. A mile nearer Lake Erie many gas-bubbles gamboled on the stream. Efforts to convey the gas to the light-house at Dunkirk failed, as it was only half the weight of air and would not descend the difference in elevation.
A light-house at Erie was lighted by natural-gas in 1831, “the Burning Spring,” a sheet of water through which the vapor bubbled, furnishing the supply. A tower erected over the spring held the gas that accumulated during the day and wooden-pipes conveyed it at night to the light-house.
Dr. Charles Oesterlin, a young German physician, sixty years ago unpacked his pill-boxes and hung out his little sign at Findlay, in Northwestern Ohio. He was an expert geologist and mineralogist, but the flat Black Swamp afforded poor opportunities to study the rocks underlying the limestone. The young physician detected the odor of sulphuretted hydrogen in the town and along the banks of the Blanchard River. It puzzled him to guess the source of the odor. He spoke to the farmers, who smelled the stuff, knew nothing and cared less about its origin or properties. The Doctor searched for a sulphur-spring. In October of 1836 the solution came. A farmer was digging a well three miles from town. A spring was tapped and the water “boiled,” as the diggers expressed it. Debating what to do, they were called to supper, returned after dark and lighted a torch to examine the well. Holding the torch over the well an explosion startled them and a flame ascended that lasted for days. Nobody was seriously hurt, but all thought the devil had a finger in the pie. Dr. Oesterlin connected the incident with the odor and it confirmed his theory of a gas that would burn and might serve as fuel. At a stone-quarry he made a cone of mud over a fissure, covered it with a bucket and applied a light. When the Doctor picked himself up in an adjoining corn-field the bucket was still sailing north towards Toledo. Daniel Foster, another Findlay farmer, dug a well in 1838. Gas issued from the hole before water was seen. Foster had a practical mind. He inverted a copper-kettle over the hole, rigged a wooden pump-stock beneath the kettle, plastered around it with clay, joined more pump-stocks together, stuck an old gun-barrel in the end of the last one, lighted the gas in his kitchen and by means of the flame boiled water, roasted coffee and illumined the apartment. Then Dr. Oesterlin declared Findlay was right over a vast caldron of gas. People laughed at him, adhered to tallow-dips and positively refused to swallow such a dose. Petroleum-developments in Pennsylvania fortified his faith and he sought to interest the public in a company to “bore a hole twenty inches across.” Sinners in Noah’s day were less impervious. Business-men scoffed and declined to subscribe for stock. He tried again in 1864 and 1867 with the same result. A company was organized to manufacture coal-gas. He talked of the absurdity of making gas at Findlay as equal to setting up a manufactory of air or water. It was no use. At last the triumph of natural-gas in Pennsylvania was manifested too strongly for the obtuse Findlayites to ignore it. In 1884 the Doctor managed to enlist four-thousand dollars of capital and start a well in a grove a mile east of town, where the odor was pungent and gas flowing through a tile-pipe he planted in the ground burned for weeks. He watched the progress of the work with feverish anxiety. The hopes of fifty long years were to be grandly realized or dashed forever. Sleepless nights succeeded restless days as the veteran’s heart-beats kept time with the rhythmic churning of the drill. At five, six and seven-hundred feet morsels of gas quickened the expectations of success. At eleven-hundred feet, in the Trenton limestone, on November tenth, 1884, gas burst forth with terrific force. The well was drilled sixteen-hundred feet and encountered salt-water. It was plugged below the gas-vein, the gas was lighted, an immense flame shot up and for months a quarter-million feet a day burned in the open air. Findlay grew from five-thousand to fifteen-thousand population and manufacturing flourished. Dr. Oesterlin, slight of frame, infirm with age, his thin locks and beard white as snow, had waited fifty years for his vindication. It came when he had reached four-score, full, complete and overwhelming. He bore his honors meekly, lived to round out eighty-two and nowhere is it recorded that he even once yielded to the temptation of remarking: “I told you so!”
DR. CHAS. OESTERLIN SAMUEL SPEECHLY
Gas was used as fuel at pumping-wells on Oil Creek in 1862. It was first collected in “gas-barrels,” one pipe leading from the well to the receptacle and another from the barrel to the boiler. Many fires originated from the flame, when the pressure of gas was small, running back to the barrel and exploding it. A pumper at Rouseville, seated on a gas-barrel at such a moment, went skyward and may be ascending yet, as he never returned for his week’s wages. D. G. Stillwell, better known as “Buffalo Joe,” drilled a gasser in 1867 at Oil City, on the site of the Greenfield Lumber-Company’s office. He piped the gas to several houses, but the danger from constant changes of pressure led to its abandonment. This is the first authentic record of the use of “the essence of Sheol” for cooking food and heating dwellings. In 1883 the Oil-City Fuel-Supply Company laid a six-inch gas-line to wells at McPherson’s Corners, Pinegrove township, eight miles distant. The gas was produced from the second and third sands, at a depth of nine to ten-hundred feet and a pressure not exceeding two-hundred pounds to the square inch. In 1885 the late Samuel Speechly started a well on his farm near McPherson’s, intending to drill three-thousand feet in search of the Bradford sand. Oil-bearing strata dip twenty feet to the mile southward and Speechly believed the northern rocks existed far beneath the ordinary third-sand in Venango county. On April thirteenth, at nineteen-hundred feet, the drill penetrated what has since been called the “Speechly sand,” the most extraordinary and valuable fuel-sand as yet discovered. In this sand at three feet pressure[pressure] of gas became entirely too great to keep jerking the tools. The gas company leased the well and turned it into the line without being able to gauge it on account of the high volume. Speechly commenced a second well and the company, having previously laid a new ten-inch line to Oil City, constructed branches to Franklin and Titusville. The second well proved to be the largest to the present time, excepting the Big Moses in West Virginia. For a time it could not be controlled. The roar of the escaping gas could be heard for miles. Eventually it was tubed and the pressure was six-hundred pounds. Many wells in other fields have had greater pressure, but the large volume of the Speechly well made it a wonder. One day all the other wells connected with the main-line were discontinued from the line temporarily and the Jumbo turned in. The flow was sufficient to supply Oil City, Titusville and Franklin with all the gas required. Hundreds of wells have been drilled to the Speechly sand and the field now reaches from the southern part of Rockland township, Venango county, to Tionesta township, Forest county. It is about thirty miles long, with an average width of three miles, while the sand ranges in thickness from fifty to one-hundred feet. The pressure gradually diminishes. It requires constant drilling to keep up the supply, the Oil-City Company alone having about four-hundred wells.
Samuel Speechly died on Sunday night, January ninth, 1893, aged sixty-one, at his home in the gas-district bearing his name. His life was notably eventful, adventurous and fortunate. Born in England in 1832, at fourteen he began to learn locomotive-building and marine-engineering at Newcastle-on-Tyne. At twenty Robert Stephenson & Co. sent him to China to join a steamer engaged in the opium-trade. In 1855 he entered the service of the Chinese government to suppress piracy on the coast, and in 1857 started at Hong Kong the first engineering-business in the vast empire ruled by the pig-tailed Brother of the Sun. He visited America in 1872 and lived in Philadelphia. Wanting plenty of room, he went to Northwestern Pennsylvania, resided a year in Cranberry township, concluded to stay and settled on what subsequently became the famous Speechly farm. The well he drilled in 1885 had neither oil nor gas in the usual formations. Veteran operators advised him to abandon it, but Speechly entertained a notion of his own and the world knows the sequel. He was married in China in 1864 to Miss Margaret Galbraith, who survives him, with two daughters, Emily, born in China, and Adelaide, born in America. His widow and children occupy the old home on the farm.
Bishop Potter, stopping at Narrowsburg in 1854, noticed jets of gas exuding from the bank of the Delaware river at Dingman’s Ferry, forty miles above Easton, and published an article on the subject. A company in 1860 bored three wells, but the result was not encouraging, as politicians are the most gaseous bodies Northampton county has produced for thirty years. A gas-well at Erie attracted considerable attention in 1860 and was followed by a number more, which from a shallow depth yielded fuel to run several factories. East Liverpool, Ohio, put the product to practical use early in the seventies as a substitute for coal. The first well, drilled in 1860, caught fire and destroyed the rig. Geologists say natural-gas is the disembodied spirits of plants that grew in the sunshine of ages long before the foundations of the buried coal-measures were laid, so long ago shut up and forsaken by the light-hearted sun that it is a wonder they hadn’t forgotten their former affinity. But they hadn’t. They rushed out to the devouring kiss of their old flame at the first tap of the drill on their prison-house, like a foolish girl at the return of a fickle lover. They found Old Sol flirting with their younger sister, playing sweet to a lot of new vegetation. Before they had time to form a sewing-circle and resolve that all the male sex are horrid, they took fire with indignation at his fickleness and the tool-dresser’s forge and burst with a tremendous explosion. The fire was quenched and gas poured out of the pioneer-well fifteen years. Street-lamps were left burning all day, which was cheaper than to bother putting them out, and East Liverpool prospered as a hive of the pottery-industry. The celebrated well at East Sandy, Venango county, which gave birth to Gas City in 1869, burned a year with a roar audible three miles. Becoming partially exhausted, the fire was put out and the product was used for fuel at numerous wells. The famous Newton well, on the A. H. Nelson farm, was struck in May of 1872 and piped in August to Titusville, five miles south west. Its half-million cubic-feet per day supplied three-hundred firms and families with light and fuel. Henry Hinckley and A. R. Williams organized the company, one of the very first in Pennsylvania to utilize natural-gas on an extensive scale. The same year gas from the Lambing well was piped to Fairview and Petrolia. The Waugh well at Millerstown and the Berlin at Thompson’s Corners, Butler county, were the next big gassers. The great Delamater No. 2, near St. Joe, finished in 1874, for months was the biggest gas-well in the world. Its output was conveyed to the rolling-mills at Sharpsburg. The first gas-well in Butler county is credited to John Criswell, of Newcastle, who drilled for salt-water in 1840 near Centreville, struck a vein of the vapor at seven-hundred feet and fired it to heat his evaporating-pans.
At Leechburg and Apollo natural-gas has been used in puddling-furnaces since 1872. It will supply the huge mills at Vandergrift, the model town that is to be the county-seat of Vandergrift county, which the next Legislature will set off from Armstrong, Westmoreland and contiguous districts. It was the fuel of the cutlery-works at Beaver Falls from 1876 until the wells ceased producing in 1884. In 1875 Spang & Chalfant piped it from Butler to their mills in the suburbs of Pittsburg. Though Pittsburgers knew of its value in the oil-region for twenty years, they regarded it as a freak and not calculated to affect their interests favorably. Iron manufactured by its means was of superior quality, owing to the absence of sulphur and the intensity of the heat. In 1877 the Haymaker well opened the Murraysville gas-field, but that immense storehouse of potential energy lay dormant until Pew & Emerson piped the product to Pittsburg. In June of 1884 George Westinghouse, inventor of the air-brake and of various electric-appliances, struck a gas-well near his residence in Pittsburg. From that date the development was enormous. Wells producing from two to twenty-million cubic-feet a day were in order. The Philadelphia Company—Westinghouse was its president—alone tied up forty-thousand acres of gas-territory, drilled hundreds of wells and laid thousands of miles of pipes. Hon. James M. Guffey headed big corporations that supplied Wheeling, a portion of Pittsburg and dozens of smaller towns. The coal displacement in Pittsburg equaled thirty-thousand tons daily. Twenty and twenty-four-inch mains intersected the city. Iron, brass, steel and metal-working establishments consumed it. Glass-factories turned out by its aid plate-glass such as mankind had never seen before. The flaming breath of the new demon transformed the appearance and revolutionized the iron-manufacture of the Birmingham of America. The Smoky City was a misnomer. Soot and dirt and smoke and cinders disappeared. People washed their faces, men wore “biled shirts” and girls dressed in white. The touch of a fairy-wand could not have made a more resplendent change. Think of green grass, emerald hues, clear sunlight and clean walls in Pittsburg! At first timid folks feared to introduce it, because the pressure could not be regulated. All this has been remedied. The roaring, hissing monster that almost bursts the gauge at the well is tamed and subjugated to the meekness of a dove by valves and gasometers, which can reduce the pressure to a single ounce. Queer, isn’t it, that Pittsburg should be metamorphosed by natural-gas—the fires of hell as it were—into a city of delightful homes, an industrial paradise?
Gas-wells of high pressure were found in Ohio by thousands, as though striving to vie with the oil-wells which, beginning at Mecca in 1860 and ending at Lima, stocked up twenty-million barrels of crude. Over three-hundred companies were chartered in a year to supply every town from Cincinnati to Ashtabula. Natural-gas raged and blistered and for a term was the genuine “Ohio idea.” For thirty years wells at New Cumberland, West Virginia, have furnished fuel to burn brick. The same state has the biggest gassers in existence and lines to important cities are projected. If “the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain.” Indiana has gas and oil in four counties, with Gas City as headquarters and lots of fuel for houses and factories in Indianapolis and the chief cities. The Hoosiers have carried out the principle of Edward Eggleston’s Mrs. Means: “When you’re a-gittin’ git plenty, I say.” Illinois had a morsel of oil and gas in wells at Litchfield. Kentucky and Tennessee are blessed with “a genteel competence” and Kansas has not escaped. Michigan has gas-wells at Port Huron and St. Paul once boasted a company capitalized at a half-million. Buffalo inhaled its first whiff of natural-gas, piped from wells in McKean county, on December first, 1886. Youngstown was initiated next day, from wells in Venango. A Mormon company bored wells at Salt Lake, but polygamy was not supplanted by any odor more unsavory. In Canada gas is abundant and Robert Ferguson, now a well-to-do farmer near Port Sarnia, first turned it into an engine-cylinder as a joke on the engineer at the pump-station in Enniskillen township. Steam was low, the engineer was absent, Ferguson cut the pipe leading from the boiler, connected it with one from a gas-well near-by, opened the throttle and, to his astonishment, found the pressure greater than steam. Natural-gas, a gift worthy of the immortal gods, worthy of the admiration of Vulcan, worthy of the praise of poets and historians, the agent of progress and saver of labor, is not a trifle to be brushed off like a fly or dismissed with a contemptuous sneer.