The Chinese were the first to drill with tools attached to ropes, which they twisted from rattan.
The Liverpool Lamp, devised by an unknown Englishman, was the first to have a glass-chimney and do away with smoke.
The first tubing in oil-wells was manufactured at Pittsburg, with brass screw-joints soldered on the pipe, the same as at Tarentum salt-wells.
The first steamboat reached the mouth of Oil Creek in 1828, with a load of Pittsburgers. The first train crossed Oil Creek into Oil City on a track on the ice.
William A. Smith, who drilled the Drake well, made the first rimmer. While enlarging a well with a bit the point broke off, after which greater progress was noted. The accident suggested the rimmer.
The first white settler in the Pennsylvania oil-regions was John Frazier, who built a cabin at Wenango—Franklin—in 1745, kept a gun-shop and traded with the Indians until driven off by the French in 1753, the year of George Washington’s visit.
Jonathan Titus located at Titusville in 1797, on land made famous by the Drake well. In that year the first oil skimmed from Oil Creek to be marketed was sold at Pittsburg, then a collection of log-cabins, at sixteen dollars a gallon! Now people kick at half that many cents for the refined article.
Early well-owners found the tools and fuel, paid all expenses but labor and paid three-dollars-and-fifty-cents per foot to the contractor, yet so many contractors failed that a lien-law was passed. George Koch, in November of 1873, took out a patent on fluted drills, which did away with the rimmer, reduced the time of drilling a well from sixty days to twenty and reduced the price from three dollars per foot to fifty cents.[cents.]
Sam Taft was the first to use a line to control the engine from the derrick, at a well near McClintockville, in 1867. Henry Webber was the first to regulate the motion of the engine from the derrick. He drilled a well near Smoky City, on the Porter farm, in 1863, with a rod from the derrick to the throttle-valve. He also dressed the tools, with the forge in the derrick, perhaps the first time this was done. He drilled this well six-hundred feet with no help. Near this well was the first plank-derrick in the oil-country.
The first derricks were of poles, twelve feet base and twenty-eight to thirty feet high. The ladder was made by putting pins through a corner of a leg of the derrick. The Samson-post was mortised in the ground. The band-wheel was hung in a frame like a grindstone. A single bull-wheel, made out of about a thousand feet of lumber, placed on the side of the derrick next to the band-wheel, with a rope or old rubber-belt for a brake, was used. When the tools were let down the former would burn and smoke, the latter would smell like ancient codfish.