Drake, Edwin 2
(see main node)
Edwin Laurentine Drake (March 29, 1819 – November 9, 1880), also known as Colonel Drake, was an American businessman and the first American to successfully drill for oil.
Early life
Edwin Drake was born in Greenville, New York on March 29, 1819, the son of Lyman and Laura Drake. He grew up on family farms around New York state and Castleton, Vermont before leaving home at the age of 19. He spent the early parts of his life working the railways around New Haven, Connecticut as a clerk, express agent and a conductor. During this time, in 1845, he married Philena Adams who died while giving birth to their second child in 1854. Drake remarried three years later to Laura Dowd, sixteen years his junior, in 1857. During this summer, illness prevented Drake from carrying on with his job. He retained the privileges of a train conductor, including free travel on the railroads. By 1858, the Drake family found themselves living in Titusville, Pennsylvania.
Drake was a Freemason.[1][2]
Seneca Oil
While petroleum oil was known prior to this, there was no appreciable market for it. Samuel Martin Kier is credited with founding the first American oil refinery in Pittsburgh. He was the first person in the United States to refine crude oil into lamp oil (kerosene). Along with a new lamp to burn Kier's product a new market to replace whale oil as a lamp oil began to develop.[3][4]
Seneca Oil, originally called the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company , was founded by George Bissell and Jonathan Eveleth. They created the company after hearing of reports that petroleum collected from an oil spring in Titusville, Pennsylvania was suitable for use as lamp fuel. Until this time, the primary lamp fuel had been whale oil. Bissell found that the "rock oil" would be a practical alternative if a method could be devised to extract the oil from the ground.
Interest in the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company was initially low until a report commissioned by Bissell and Eveleth showed that there was significant economic value in petroleum. Due to a disagreement between the shareholders and the pair, the company was split and Seneca Oil was formed in 1858. Before being offered a job by Bissell and Eveleth, Drake bought stock in Seneca Oil. But his job opportunity with the company arose because both parties were staying in the same hotel in Titusville. He was hired on a salary of $1,000 a year to investigate the oil seeps on land owned by Seneca Oil.
Oil drilling
See also: Drake Well
Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania home where Edwin Drake lived the last seven years of his life, from 1873 until 1880
Edwin Drake was hired by the Seneca Oil Company to investigate suspected oil deposits in Titusville, Pennsylvania.[5] James Townsend, President of the Seneca Oil Company, sent Drake to the site in the spring of 1858. The oil company chose the retired railway man partly because he had free use of the rail. Drake had no military experience, but Townsend gave him the title of "Colonel" in order to impress the local townspeople.[6]
Drake decided to drill in the manner of salt well drillers. He purchased a steam engine in Erie, Pennsylvania, to power the drill. The well was dug on an island on the Oil Creek. It took some time for the drillers to get through the layers of gravel. At 16 feet (5 m) the sides of the hole began to collapse. Those helping him began to despair, but not Drake. It was at this point that he devised the idea of a drive pipe. This cast iron pipe consisted of 10-foot-long (3.0 m) joints. The pipe was driven down into the ground. At 32 feet (10 m) they struck bedrock. The drilling tools were now lowered through the pipe and steam was used to drill through the bedrock. The drilling, however, was slow. Progress was made at the rate of just three feet per day. After initial difficulty locating the necessary parts to build the well, which resulted in his well being nicknamed "Drake's Folly", Drake proved successful.
Meanwhile, crowds of people began to gather to jeer at the apparently unproductive operation. By 1859, Drake was also running out of money. Drake's colleagues back in Connecticut gave up on finding any oil by April 1859 and after spending $2,500, Drake took out a $500 loan to keep the operation going.[7] On August 27, 1859, Drake had persevered and his drill bit had reached a total depth of 69.5 feet (21 m).[8][9] At that point the bit hit a crevice. The men packed up for the day. The next morning Drake’s driller, Billy Smith, looked into the hole in preparation for another day’s work. He was surprised and delighted to see crude oil rising up. Drake was summoned and the oil was brought to the surface with a hand pitcher pump. The oil was collected in a bath tub.
Drake is famous for pioneering a new method for producing oil from the ground. He drilled using piping to prevent borehole collapse, allowing for the drill to penetrate further and further into the ground. Previous methods for collecting oil had been limited. Ground collection of oil consisted of gathering it from where it occurred naturally, such as from oil seeps or shallow holes dug into the ground. Drake tried the latter method initially when looking for oil near Titusville. However, it failed to produce economically viable amounts of oil. Alternative methods of digging large shafts into the ground also failed, as collapse from water seepage almost always occurred. The significant step that Drake took was to drive a 32-foot iron pipe through the ground into the bedrock below. This allowed Drake to drill inside the pipe, without the hole collapsing from the water seepage. The principle behind this idea is still employed today by all companies drilling for hydrocarbons.
Edwin Drake grave and memorial in Titusville, Pennsylvania
Claims of prior art exist, including Bóbrka, Poland in 1854, Wietze, Germany in 1857, and Oil Springs, Ontario, Canada[10] in 1858. The importance of the Drake Well near Titusville was that it prompted the first great wave of investment and additional drilling that established petroleum as a major industry.[11] Within a day of Drake's striking oil, Drake’s methods were being imitated by others along Oil Creek and in the immediate area. This culminated with the establishment of several oil boom towns along the creek. Drake's well produced 25 barrels (4.0 m3) of oil a day. By 1872, the entire area was producing 15.9 thousand barrels (2,530 m3) a day.[12]
Drake set up a stock company to extract and market the oil. But, while his pioneering work led to the growth of an oil industry that made many people fabulously rich, for Drake riches proved elusive. Drake did not possess good business acumen. He failed to patent his drilling invention, and proceeded to lose all of his savings in oil speculation in 1863. He was to end up as an impoverished old man, and in 1872 Pennsylvania voted an annuity of $1,500 to the "crazy man" whose determination founded the oil industry.
He died on November 9, 1880 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he had lived since 1874. He and his wife are buried in Titusville, Pennsylvania next to a memorial built in his honor.
In popular culture
Edwin Drake and Billy Smith appear in À l'ombre des derricks ("In the Shadow of the Derricks"), an episode of the Franco-Belgian comics Western series Lucky Luke, published in 1960, written by René Goscinny (co-creator of Asterix) and drawn by Morris. The action takes place at Titusville where the black gold rush also attracts a crooked lawyer who takes over the town and the oilfields. Drake and Smith put an end to his reign of terror. Drake and Smith also appear in the animated television version of the story produced in the early 1980s.
Edwin Drake is portrayed by Richard Kiley in the January 10, 1964 edition of "The Great Adventure" history teleplay a CBS Television production entitled "The Colonel from Connecticut."
Drake is portrayed by Vincent Price in the 1954 industrial film, Born In Freedom: The Story of Colonel Drake, sponsored by the climate denial propagandists American Petroleum Institute
Extra Connections:
Following Drake’s discovery, John Wilkes Booth and partners invested in oil drilling. Booth was already growing more obsessed with the South's worsening situation in the Civil War and angered at Lincoln's re-election. He withdrew from the oil business on November 27, 1864, with a substantial loss of his $6,000 investment ($81,400 in 2010 dollars).
See also
Knowledge Web Content (see main node)
Drake, Edwin Laurentine.
ACHIEVEMENT(S): The first commercial oil well.
NICKNAME/ALIAS: “Colonel”.
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 29th March 1819, in Greenville, Green County, NY
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 8th November 1880, in Pennsylvania
DISCIPLINE: Oil driller
FIELD: Business
@@ LANGUAGE: English
PARENTS: Unknown
SIBLINGS: Unknown
SPOUSE: First wife, a woman of Springfield, Massachusetts (1845-54). Second wife, Laura Dow of New Haven.
CHILDREN: Four.
EDUCATION: Common School.
MAJOR WORK: None
LIFE AND TIMES: Edwin Drake grew up attending common school and working on the family farm. At nineteen, he left home to work on his uncle’s farm in Massachusetts, a journey which probably took him seven months. On the way, he worked as a night clerk on a steamboat and began a varied and well-travelled career which lasted for several years.
After about a year at his uncle’s, he found life found boring and unsociable, so he decided to look for work in town. For the next two years, he worked in Tecumseh, Massachusetts, as a hotel clerk. After a visit to his family, he worked in New Haven as a clerk for a dry goods company. Four years later he moved on to the same job in New York.
Around 1845, he moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, and changed jobs again. This time he became an express agent for the Boston and Albany Railroad. After five years, he left to work as a conductor on the New York and New Haven railroad for the next eight years.
Some time during the 1850s, he bought stock in George Bissell’s Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, which held leases on the land around Titusville, Pennsylvania. It was there that surface oil was being produced and in 1855, Silliman, jnr* analysed the oil and found it to be a valuable raw material, easily and inexpensively converted into commercial products. Unfortunately, enough the oil could not be obtained, so nothing was done for three years.
In December 1857, Drake was sent to Oil Creek, Titusville, to pick up some legal documents. In his letter of introduction, so as to create an authoritative impression he was referred to as “Colonel.” The nickname stuck..
During the journey to Titusville, he observed the techniques being used to drill salt-wells at Syracuse in Pittsburgh. The idea that such a technique could be used to drill for oil (already put forward by George Bissell,) excited Drake's imagination. When he returned home he persuaded the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company to let him drill for oil on their land, and a lease was agreed.
He was to receive a royalty of twelve cents on every barrel of oil he produced. A new company was formed, the Seneca Oil Company. Although he was only a minor stockholder, Drake was made President and took responsibility for drilling operations in Titusville.
The nearest town, Erie, was forty miles distant, and connected by stagecoach only, so getting a driller, an engine-house and tools to this remote location was difficult. It took Drake months to gather the necessary equipment and then a further wait before he could get a driller who knew how to operate it. By this time it was winter, so work had to be suspended.
In the spring, he borrowed a wagon and drove a hundred miles to Tarentum, where salt wells were still being pumped, in order to find a driller. Back in Titusville it took them several months of experiment and accident before, they struck oil, sixty-nine feet below the surface, on 27th August 1859.
On the first day twenty-five barrels of oil were produced. The successful breakthrough had been made possible by Drake’s drilling invention: a pipe liner which prevented clay and quicksand from filling the drill hole.
The eventual discovery of oil not only dispelled the local rumours that Drake was a madman, but turned the community oil-crazy. Many citizens of Titusville, whose sole prospect had been manual labor on remote farms, now found themselves making a fortune.
The proof that exploitable oil lay beneath the surface of the earth caused a wave of prospective drilling to sweep across the entire country. Drake was not a good businessman and neglected to patent his invention. Ignoring advice to produce oil for himself, he acted as an oil commission agent for four years.
In 1863, he moved to New York, where he later lost all his savings, then drifted for several years until returning to Pennsylvania, ill and poor. The citizens of Titusville, who had profited so much by his earlier discovery, were moved by his condition and collected money for him.
In 1870, he moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In 1876 he was voted an annuity of $1,500 by the State of Pennsylvania. Four years later he died and his body was taken to Titusville, where a monument was erected in his honour.
ASSESSMENT: Despite his lack of knowledge, Drake's perseverance made possible the American oil revolution.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: His work affected Maybach* and Rockefeller*@@
ONELINER: Edwin Drake, first oil-driller
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Ida M. Tarbell,The History of the Standard Oil Company, Peter Smith, Gloucester, Massachusetts. 1963.