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

Chapter 2  -  Pennsylvania Supreme to 1895

American petroleum production did not extend beyond Oil Creek during 1859. There did get underway shortly after the completion of the Drake weIl a lively acquisition of land by means of oil leases and fee purchases of farms up and down Oil Creek and especially in the vicinity of the producing weIl. Spear-heading this buying spree were Drake's enterprising partners in the Seneca Oil Company. The man who had caused all the excitement, the Colonel, made no move to extend his holdings or to cash in on his reputation. In the early 1860s new fields were found at some distance from Titusville, spreading into Venango County around Oil City and Franklin. There were small fields in Warren County, near the town of tWarren and fanning out generally south of the town of Warren. Erie, Pennsylvania, situated on Lake Erie, became the first refinery center of the Pennsylvania oilfields.

The year 1860 witnessed the discovery of petroleum in two European countries, Germany and Romania, and in two American states, West Virginia and Ohio. Germany's first productive oil weIL was drilled on the Hanigsen salt dome near Hannover. It opened the Neinhagen-Hanigsen oilfield which until recently accounted for the major part of Germany's production. Mosarele was the locale of the first Romanian oilfield.

Near the mouth of a creek called Burning Springs Run in Wirt County, West Virginia, the Rathbone brothers brought in a hundred barrel a day weIl from a depth of 303 feet in May of 1860. On the Wiliam Rayley farm near the town of Macksburg, Ohio; James Dutton, Alden Warren and John Smithson completed an oil weIl at a depth of fifty feet. Another Ohio discovery was made near Mecca in Trumbull County. In the same year of 1860, J. D. Karns finished a weIL making forty or fifty barrels a day near Elizabeth, Virginia, but the supply was limited to a single hole, no productive field resulted. In June of 1860, G. W. Brown drilled a 275 foot hole near Paola, Kansas and managed to skim off a barrel of oil a day from the salt water; hardly commercial production.

On the 4th of April, 1861, the Southern Confederacy was formed. On the 17th of April, 1861, the first known flowing oil weIL was brought into production. It was located on the Buchanan farm near Oil Creek. In November, 1861, the first shipload of petroleum crossed the Atlantic Ocean; The cargo ship was a sailing vessel, the Elizabeth Watts. In the same year Peru and Formosa struck their first oil. The Peruvian discovery was found near Zorritos.

In 1862, Hugh Nixon Shaw drilled and brought in Canada's first ''gusher'' from a depth of 165 feet in Lambton County, Ontario. In 1862, a pioneer Pennsylvania oil man, A. M. Cassedy, opened up the Florence Field in the state of Colorado. He drilled six producers, ranging in depth from sixty to ninety feet. In the same year, Colonel E. A. L. Roberts conceived the idea of shooting wells with torpedoes to increase the flow of oil. In 1862, J. W. Sherman came to Titusville from Cleveland, Ohio. He took all the money that he and his wife could raise to buy a lease on a considerable portion of the Foster farm, instead of the single acre which was the usual oil lease. Sherman traded small interests in the first weIl to procure machinery and fuel. Sherman'a interest in this weIl eventually paid him almost two million dollars; there is no record of what he made on the other wells put down on his large-size lease. With one acre spacing in vogue, Oil Creek was literally a forest of wooden derricks.

In 1860, the founders of the Atlantic Refining Company established the oil exporting firm of Warden, Frew and Company in Philadelphia. In 1866 the firm merged with Peter Wright and Sons to form the Atlantic Petroleum Storage Company. Atlantic Petroleum Storage changed its name on April 29, 1870 to the Atlantic Refining Cornpany, a Pennsylvania corporation. In 1863, John D. Rockefeller and Maurice B. Clark, partners in the mercantile commission business, joined with two of Clark' s brothers in aligning themselves with Samuel Andrews, a self-taught refiner, in manufacturing kerosene. They found the oil business profitable.

Small amounts of oil were recovered from shallow wells in the Crimea by Colonel Cowen, an American, in 1864. On April 9, 1865, the American Civil War came to an end with the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Courthouse. Five days later President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

In January of 1865, Colonel E. A. L. Roberts first demonstrated the use of nitro-glycerine in shooting oil wells. In 1865, Job Moses drilled into pay sand at the depth of 1060 feet in Cattaraugus County, New York. In 1865, John D. RockefeIler and Samuel Andrews bought out the holdings of the three Clark brothers to form the firm of RockefeIler and Andrews.

1866 saw the discovery of the first oilfield in Russia to be found by the drill, in province of Kuban. 1866 was the year oil was found in British Borneo, on the island of Lahuan. Tennessee had its first producer in Overton County, and Texas had its first producer in Nacogdoches County. The first field in France, named Pechelbronn, which had been producing from hand dug pits for many years, got its first drilled weIl in 1866. In this year, Alfred Nobel invented dynamite by mixing nitroglycerine with sawdust. Dynamite, the first safe and manageable explosive, was to make commercial seismograph work possible sixty years later.

Kentucky came into the oil picture in 1867 with the discovery of petroleum at the depth of 400 feet on the Hughes farm, situated on Richland Creek in Knox County. Petroleum was used successfully in this year for the first time as fuel for a locomotive on the Warren and Franklin Railroad of Pennsylvania. Another revolutionary step was taken in 1867, when the German team of Nikolaus Otto and Eugen Langen invented the internal combustion engine.

California drilled its first commercial oil weIl in 1867; the Philadelphia California Petroleum Company' s "Ojai #6“ in the Ojai field in Ventura County. In 1856, Andreas Pico had collected oil from seepages in Pico Canyon of Los Angeles County and distilled it for illuminating purposes for the San Fernando Mission. In 1861 a tunnel brought producrion to the Santa Paula field of Ventura County, and in the same year, oil was mined from open pits at what was to be the McKittrick field of Kern County. In 1866 the Stanford brothers dug an 80 foot up-sloping tunnel into the side of Sulphur Mountain in Ventura County and allowed gravity to collect their oil. It was the first of thirty-one such producing tunnels in Sulphur Mountain. One tunnel was 1600 feet long.

In 1868, the Standard Oil Company of Pennsylvania was organized; the first company to bear the Standard name. On May 10, 1869, the first transcontinental railway was finished with the driving of a golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah, which linked together the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific lines. By 1869, the Pennsylvania oilfields extended south into Clarion, Armstrong and Butler counties. On January 10, 1870, in Cleveland, Ohio, the Standard Oil Company of Ohie was formed, absorbing the firm of RockefeIler, Andrews and Flagler. The first drilled weIl to produce oil for Japan was finished in this year.

In 1871, Job Moses discovered the Bradford oilfield in Pennsylvania. This field was extended across the state line into New York a few years later. Also in 1871, the first commercial production in Indiana was established near Terre Haute. In 1874, the Wietze oilfield was found in Germany.

In 1875, the Newhall field was discovered in Los Angeles County by C. C. Metrey. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1875 and patented it in 1876. In 1876 the first oil weIl was completed in Mexico at Tuxpan. O. P. Taylor found the Alleghany County field in New York in 1879, the same year Thomas Edison invented the incandescent lamp. Kerosene was the all-important product of the oil companies; the principle use of which, illumination, would pass over to the incandescent lamp in a few decades. What would the poor oil tnan do then?

On November 8, 1880, Colonel Edwin L. Drake died in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. On January 2, 1882, the Standard Oil Trust Agreement was signed. Twenty-nine companies were brought together under the plan. On August 10, 1882, the Standard Oil Company of New York was incorporated and the number of Standard companies made an even thirty. In 1882 rotary drilling, so important to modern petroleum engineering techniques, was first used to drill water wells in the Dakota Territory. In 1882 Thomas R. Bard found Tapo North oilfield in Ventura County; eight years later he was to become the first president of the Union Oil Company of California. 

In Wyoming in 1884, the Atlantic Pacific Oil Company brought in the state’s first commercial production at the Dallas Dome field. Oil was discovered in Sumatra in the Langkat district by Aeilco Zijlker in 1885. The first weIl flowed only five barrels per day and the second one was not much larger; yet this field was the first property to' be acquired by Royal Dutch. In fact the Royal Dutch Company was organized for the specific purpose of taking over Zijlker’s lease concession in the Langkat province. Sumatra production, at first a mere trickle, thus became the foundation stone of the mighty Royal Dutch Shell.

In 1887 the Sespe oilfield of Ventura County and the McKittrick oilfield of Kern County California, had their first producing wells. Argentina struck oil in 1887 in the province of Mendoza near the border of Chile. India obtained its first production in 1888 when the Burmah Oil Company, Ltd. drilled successfully near Digboi.

In 1888, in what was to be the East half of the SW quarter of Section 5, Township 4 South, Range 3 West, a Pennsylvania oil man named Palmer. had drilled a weIl in what was to be Carter County, Oklahoma. Palmer obtained a good flow of oil at a depth of 425 feet. This part of Oklaqoma remained in the hands of the Indian tribes until the first decade of the twentieth century. After discovering petroleum, this oil man had then tried to find some way of acquiring title to the tribal (common) land. Failing to discover any means of marketing the oil as his possession, Mr. Palmer had abandoned the project. A quarter of a century later. Wirt Franklin rediscovered the great Healdton oilfield.

The German engineer, Karl Benz, built the first vehicle with an internal combustion engine in 1885. It was a three wheel automobile which he demonstrated on the streets of Munich in 1886. In 1885 oil was discovered at Lima. Ohio; it had a high sulphur content and gave off a disagreeable odor. In 1886, oil was found for the first time in the state of Illinois at Litchfield, and in the state of Michigan in St. Clair County. The founders of the Sun Oil Company, Joseph Newton Pew and E. O. Emerson went into the oil business in Ohio in 1886.

1889 witnessed much activity in the petroleum industry. The Timber Canyon field came into production in Ventura County, California. The Standard Oil Company of Indiana was incorporated in June. Commercial quantities of oil were discovered for the first time in Burman, at Yenangyaung. Missouri had its first oil in Bates County and Wyoming added the Salt Lake field. Peru's largest oilfield, Brea-Parinas, came into being in this same 1889.

1889 saw the enactment of the opening of the Oklahoma Territory to white settlers. This took place on April 22nd, when 20,000 people made the famous "Run" for homesteads . The Run started by the firing of a gun at high noon, when Federal troops fell back and let the new settlers enter the Territory. The 20,000 were known as Boomers. Many a "Boomer" reached a choice piece of land ahead of all the other "Boomers," only to find it already occupied by a "Sooner," who had infiltrated the state line ahead of the official opening of the Territory. The University of Oklahoma football teams are called the "Sooners" today, and they, too, are good at infiltrating lines. Before 1889 was over, the United States Oil and Gas Company had sunk a 36 foot hole on Spencer Creek, near Chelsea, Oklahoma; which however, produced less than a barrel of oil per day.

On November 28, 1892, the first commercial weIl for the state of Kansas came in near Neodesha in Wilson County from a depth of 832 feet. In 1895, natural gas was discovered in a weIl driIled near Heathfield in Sussex, England.