THE HISTORY OF GEOPHYSICAL PROSPECTING
PART ONE - MARCH OF THE OIL DERRICKS

Chapter 1  -  Ancient Time to the Drake Well

Man was making use of petroleum as medicine, as a fuel and as a lubricant long before he had an alphabet or a written language. The tar pits, oil seeps, pitch lakes and asphalt outcrops were the favorite sources for the more or less viscous liquid. Every continent had surface supplies of the black ooze. Petroleum was the main ingredient in the cement employed between the building stones of the buildings of Old Persia at the dawn of history. The Persians of the Middle Ages were still building their temples with asphalt cement. Baku, on the Caspian Sea, the best surface source of oil in the Mediterranean region, was in Persian hands in the tenth century and was still held by them when Tamburlaine the Great died in 1405. In the year 1723, Peter the Great of Russia conquered the Khanate of Baku. Baku remains a Russian possession today. Pits were dug by hand throughout the Baku area in the lifetime of Peter the Great. In 1886 the first great oil producing weIl in Baku came into production from a depth of 714 feet.

In the fifth century B. C., Herodotus described the pitch spring at Zanta, an oil seep that still exists. In 66 A. D., Plutarch wrote of the discovery of petroleum near what is now the Kirkuk oilfield. Fifty years later, Pliny mentioned that Sicilian oil, produced on the island of Sicily, was used to keep the lamps burning in the Temple of Jupiter. The Romans were using burning oil as a weapon in naval warfare as early as the seventh century; while the Mogols and the Arabs of the eighth century employed crude fire grenades and crude flame throwers against each other. Many centuries prior to this, the Chinese and Japanese were making use of seeps, digging wells by hand and, according to some accounts, were digging oil wells with crude drilling machines.

The American Indians had long been using pitch to waterproof their canoes when the white man came. The sailors on the Mediterranean were waterproofing their boats with asphalt from the time of the early voyages of the Phoenicians.

In the fourteenth century, Edward Third, the English King, bought eight pounds of petroleum. This is the earliest record of the use of the word, petroleum. Before the dawn of the sixteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci had devised an earth boring machine making use of a four-legged derrick and  drillsystem; the sketch and description of which has come down to us. A century later, Sir Walter Raleigh discovered the pitch lake at Trinidad in South America.

A Missionary's account of the culture of the five civilized tribes written in 1768, reported that the Seneca Indians of western New York were using the products from hand dug wells to trade and barter both with other tribes and with the white settIers of Niagara.

There have been any number of reports of petroleum being recovered as a by-product of producing salt wells in the nineteenth century. Such news came from western Virginia in 1806; from Marietta, Ohio, in, 1814; from a weIl in Wayne County, Kentucky, in 1818; from near Monticello, Kentucky, in 1819, and from a weIl on the banks of Rennox Creek in Kentucky in 1829.

Of all the seeps from which oil was taken in the United States, the one on Oil Creek, in Pennsylvania, came in for the most publicity. Its first location on a map came in 1748, when a Swedish naturalist published an account of his travels in North America. In 1783 General Benjamin Lincoln halted his troops at Oil Creek, so that his soldiers might bathe their aching joints with the oil. In 1790, Nathaniel Carey mage a business of skimming the crude oil from the springs near Titusville and delivering his product in two small kegs by horseback to the natives of the town. 

The oil recovered from the bottom of twelve foot pits dug into petroliferous sandstone in Wirt County, West Virginia, in 1825, was used as a liniment, good for horses and humans. In 1850, two years after the discovery of gold in California, it was reported that oil from seepages in Ventura County was being used within the Missions as a means of illumination.

In 1856, Sir Henry Bessemer developed and patented his process for manufacturing steel and an American, John Shaw, drilled for oil, unsuccessfully, in southwestern Ontario in Canada. In this same year the firm of Peterson and Irwin bought a farm near Tarentum, Pennsylvania, on which was located a producing salt weIl. This weIl also produced from three to five barrels of light oil per day which found a ready market in Baltimore, Maryland.

In the following year petroleum was discovered in hand dug wells near Kleczany in Poland. In 1857 a weIl was drilled expressly for oil near the Senaca Oil Spring at Cuba, New York. The Cuba weIl was unproductive. In 1857 a well was drilled for water near Petrolia in Ontario and came in as a flowing oil weIl. In 1858, Professor G. C. K. Hanaus, while drilling for coal near Wietze, Germany, discovered oil at approximately 200 feet.

George H. Bisseil first conceived the idea of boring for oil on the Hibbard farm near Titusville, Pennsylvania. The first oil lease on this farm was taken by a New York corporation calling itself the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company; the year was 1854. By 1855 the lease had been taken over by a newly organized corporation called the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company of Connecticut. Largely financed by Connecticut money, the new corporation hired Benjamin Silliman, Jr., who occupied the Chair of Chemistry, at Yale University, to run an analysis on Oil Creek petroleum after he had looked over the oil possibilities of the Hibbard farm. Silliman wrote a glowing report on the chances of drilling a successful oil weIl on the property. He knew something of geology but what was more important, he was a cockeyed optimist.

In 1858 this same lease was in the possession of still another corporation called the Seneca Oil Company of Connecticut. The founders of the Seneca Oil Company besides George H. Bissell, were Dr. Francis B. Brewer, Dr. Dixi Crosby, Albert H. Crosby and James M. Townsend. The Seneca Oil Company contracted with Edwin L. Drake, a Connecticut Colonel, whose. principal employment over the years had been conductor on the New York and New Haven Railroad, to drill an oil weIl on the Hibbard farm near Titusville. The title of Colonel for Edwin L. Drake was the inspiration of James M. Townsend. Alert to the value of a little salesmanship to impress the local citizenry, Townsend had the legal documents mailed ahead to Colonel E. L. Drake in care of Brewer, Watson and Company at Titusville, even before Drake had departed for Pennsylvania from his home in New Haven, Connecticut.

After any number of trials and stoppages, the Drake weIl hit a depth of 69-1/2 feet and pay sand on August 27, 1859. The weIl deserves to be known as the Drake well rather than the Seneca well , because it was the “Colonel“ who had the never-say-die attitude that whipped eaeh and every obstacle to the suecessful completion of the weIl. It was on money that Drake borrowed in Titusville after the Seneca Oil Company had ordered him to abandon the project, that enabled him to finish the weIl. It was the first time in the history of the world that a well had been drilled specifically to find oil and had discovered same.

Or was it? In 1857, James Williams, a native of Scotland, commenced a search for petroleum around the seepages on the banks of the Thames River in Kent County, Ontario. In 1858 he was trying once more in the tar beds of Lambton County called Oil Springs. During 1858-1859, Williams dug a hole 49 feet deep into the tar sands, recovering from two to ten barrels per day. The verticle shaft was seven by nine feet and walled with logs. James Williams built a retort to distill his oil and sold the refined product in New York City and elsewhere. Williams may weIl have had the first integrated company.

An enterprising journalist for the "Toronto Globe" wrote a story on the Williams and Company well in the August 29, 1861 issue. "WeIl sunk 46 feet to rock; bore 100 feet in rock. This weIl averages the Iarge quantity of 60 barrels a day." The Williams weIl was said to have been in production for over two years. Just what was meant by the word „bore"? If the increase to 60 barrels is taken as accurate, then something had been done to the hand dug shaft. Journalistic accounts are not very reliable as to exact facts but if the "bore" is a factual description of machine drilling and the "boring" was done prior to August 27, 1859, then the first successful petroleum producer drilled expressly for oil, was brought in, not by a Connecticut Colonel, but by a Scotch Canadian.

The completion of the Drake weIl was the catalyst that started the great American oil industry into motion; of this there can be no doubt. Titusville is in the southeastern corner of Crawford County, Pennsylvania; twenty-five miles north is the New York state line. Crawford County borders the state of Ohio on the west. On the basis of the Drake discovery, the State of Pennsylvania became the center of the oil industry in the United States and held first rank in production for a period of thirty-five years.

The drilling equipment and the drilling know-how came from Pennsylvania and spread in all directions. It soon overran the borders into Ohio and New York. Guffey and Galey opened new oilfields from southwest Pennsylvania to Kansas and on down into Texas. Mike Benedum of Benedum and Trees, discovered oil first and last in Pennsylvania but in between he did the same thing in any number of western and southwestern states and also in South America. Hardison and Stewart started in Pennsylvania and ended up in California. The trail of the five Spellacy brothers runs successively from Pennsylyania to California to Mexico to Venezuela and back to California. E. W. Marland made several discoveries in Pennsylvania and West Virginia before moving on to much greater finds on the Indian lands of 0klahoma. It was the E. W. Marland Oil Company that hired the services of the first geophysicis to operate in the United States.