Bill Bryson - At Home

Nobody knows how many whales were killed during the great age of whaling, but one estimate suggests that about three hundred thousand were slaughtered in the four decades or so leading to 1870. That may not seem an especially vast number, but then whale numbers were not vast to begin with. In any case, the hunting was enough to drive many species to the edge of extinction. As whale numbers dwindled, whaling voyages grew longer and longer—up to four years became common and five years not unknown—and whalers were driven to search the loneliest corners of the most distant seas. All this translated into greatly increased costs. By the 1850s a gallon of whale oil sold for $2.50—half an average worker’s weekly wage—yet still the remorseless hunt continued. Many species of whale—possibly all—would have vanished forever but for a sequence of unlikely events that began in Nova Scotia in 1846 when a man named Abraham Gesner invented what for some time would be the most valuable product on Earth.

Gesner was a physician by profession, but he had an odd passion for coal geology. While experimenting with coal tar—a useless, sticky residue left over from the processing of coal into gas—he devised a way to distill it into a combustible liquid that he called (for uncertain reasons) kerosene. Kerosene burned beautifully and gave a light as strong and steady as that of whale oil, but with the potential to be produced much more cheaply. The problem was that production in volume seemed impossible. Gesner made enough to light the streets of Halifax and eventually started a plant in New York City, which ensured his personal prosperity, but kerosene squeezed from coal was never going to be more than a marginal product in the world at large. By the late 1850s, total American output was just six hundred barrels a day. (Coal tar itself, on the other hand, soon found applications in a vast range of products—paints, dyes, pesticides, medicines, and more. Coal tar became the basis of the modern chemical industry.)

Into this quandary strode another unexpected hero—a bright young man named George Bissell, who had just stepped down as superintendent of schools in New Orleans after a brief but distinguished career in public education. In 1853, on a visit to his hometown of Hanover, New Hampshire, Bissell called on a professor at his alma mater, Dartmouth College, and there he noticed a bottle of rock oil on the professor’s shelf. The professor told him that rock oil—what we would now call petroleum—seeped to the surface in western Pennsylvania. If you soaked a rag in it, the rag would burn, but nobody had found any use for rock oil other than as a constituent of patent medicines. Bissell conducted some experiments with rock oil and saw that it would make an outstanding illuminant if only it could be extracted on an industrial scale.

He formed a company called the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company and bought mineral leases along a sluggish waterway called Oil Creek, near Titusville in western Pennsylvania. Bissell’s novel idea was to drill for oil, as you would for water. Everyone before had dug for it. To get things going he dispatched a man named Edwin Drake—always referred to in history books as “Colonel” Edwin Drake—to Titusville with instructions to drill. Drake had no expertise in drilling and was not a colonel. He was a railroad conductor who had lately been forced to retire through ill health. His sole advantage to the enterprise was that he still possessed a railroad pass and could travel to Pennsylvania for free. To enhance his stature, Bissell and his associates sent correspondence to Drake addressed to “Colonel E. L. Drake.”

With a wad of borrowed money, Drake commissioned a team of drillers to begin the search for oil. Although the drillers thought Drake was an amiable fool, they gladly accepted the work and began to drill to his instructions. Almost at once the project ran into technical difficulties. To the astonishment of all, Drake showed an unexpected knack for solving mechanical problems and was able to keep the project moving. For more than a year and a half they drilled, but no oil came. By the summer of 1859, Bissell and his partners were out of funds. Reluctantly, they dispatched a letter to Drake instructing him to shut down operations. Before the letter got there, however, on August 27, 1859, at a depth of just under seventy feet, Drake and his men hit oil. It wasn’t the towering gusher that we traditionally associate with oil strikes—this oil had to be laboriously pumped to the surface—but it produced a steady volume of viscous blue-green liquid.

Although no one remotely appreciated it at the time, they had just changed the world completely and forever.

The first problem for the company was where to store all the oil they were producing. There weren’t barrels enough locally, so for the first few weeks they stored oil in bathtubs, washbasins, buckets, and whatever else they could find. Eventually, they started making purpose-built barrels with a capacity of forty-two gallons, and these remain today the standard measure for oil. Then there was the even more pressing question of exploiting it commercially. In its natural state, oil was really just horrible gunk. Bissell set to work distilling it into something purer. In so doing he discovered that, once purified, it not only made an excellent lubricant but also produced as a side product very considerable quantities of gasoline and kerosene.* The gasoline had no use at all—it was way too volatile—and so was poured away, but the kerosene made a brilliant light, as Bissell had hoped. Even better, kerosene cost much less than Gesner’s coal-squeezed product. At last the world had a cheap illuminant to rival whale oil.

Once others saw how easy it was to extract oil and turn it into kerosene, a land rush was on. Soon hundreds of derricks crowded the landscape around Oil Creek. “In three months,” John McPhee notes in In Suspect Terrain , “the endearingly named Pithole City went from a population of zero to 15,000, and other towns throughout the region sprang up—Oil City, Petroleum Center, Red Hot. John Wilkes Booth came and lost his savings, then went off to kill a president.”

In the year of Drake’s discovery, America produced two thousand barrels of oil; within ten years, it produced well over four million barrels, and in forty years that figure was sixty million. Unfortunately, Bissell, Drake, and the other investors in his company (now renamed the Seneca Oil Company) didn’t prosper to quite the degree that they had hoped. Other wells produced far greater volumes—one called Pool Well pumped out three thousand barrels a day—and the sheer number of producing wells provided such a glut for the market that the price of oil plunged catastrophically, from $10 a barrel in January 1861 to just 10 cents a barrel by the end of the year. This was good news for consumers and whales, but not so good for oilmen. As the boom turned to bust, prices of land collapsed. In 1878, a plot of land in Pithole City sold for $4.37. Thirteen years earlier it had fetched $2 million.

While others were failing and desperately trying to get out of the oil business, a small firm in Cleveland called Clark and Rockefeller, which normally dealt in pork and other farm commodities, decided to move in. It began buying up failed leases. By 1877, less than twenty years after the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania, Clark had vanished from the scene and John D. Rockefeller controlled some 90 percent of America’s oil business. Oil not only provided the raw material for an exceedingly lucrative form of illumination but also answered a desperate need for lubrication for all the engines and machinery of the new industrial age. Rockefeller’s virtual monopoly allowed him to keep prices stable and to grow fantastically rich in the process. By the closing years of the century, his personal wealth was increasing by about $1 billion a year, measured in today’s money—and this in an age without income taxes. No human being in modern times has been richer.