Exclusive Excerpt Available at www.ihscera.com
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (August 26, 2009) – Colonel Edwin L. Drake—the man who ushered in the age of oil 150 years ago this week when he struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania—was an out of work jack-of-all-trades (he was not even a real colonel) who was chosen for the job by coincidence, says IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates (IHS CERA) Chairman, Daniel Yergin in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the oil industry, The Prize. An exclusive excerpt is now available at www.ihscera.com.
“One of Drake’s most important attributes was simply that he was ava ilable for what most regarded as a crazy adventure,” said Yergin.
On August 27, 1859, “Colonel” Drake and his team – Uncle Billy and his son – struck oil just as instructions to shut down the operation arrived from his exasperated investors back in New Haven, Conn., “who were,” says Yergin, “out of money and just about out of hope.”
“What Drake did prove,” said Yergin, “is that you could drill for oil. Drake’s discovery would, in due course, bequeath mobility and power to the world’s population, play a central role in the rise and fall of nations and empires, and become a major element in the transformation of human society and how we live our lives,” writes Yergin in the book, which was recently re-released in an updated 2009 edition.
“It is striking that the anniversary of the 150th anniversary of this historic breakthrough – for that is what it was – should occur at a time when we are entering a ‘new age’ of oil,” says Yergin. “This new age is marked by the globalization of oil demand; the rise of climate change as a serious political issue; an unprecedented drive for new energy technologies; and oil’s rise as a financial asset as well as a physical commodity.”
“The very future of oil is now being seriously debated and questioned, even as the world will need more of it than ever before.”
Partial Excerpt Follows:
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THE PRIZE
The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
By Daniel Yergin
Free Press
Copyright © 1991, 1992, 2008 by Daniel Yergin
A group of investors in New Haven, CT, and New York City had the idea in the 1850s that a substance called "rock oil" that oozed out of the ground and into streams in northwest Pennsylvania -- heretofore used mainly in patent medicines – could meet a burning need. That is, it could be used as an illuminating fluid to replace whale oil, which was in short supply. And they had a report by a Yale University chemist to back-up their belief. But they also knew that digging for rock oil, or wringing it out of rags that had been dipped into streams, would not provide enough supply. Their idea was to apply the new technology for water drilling to the quest for rock oil. But they needed to find someone who could undertake what was widely regarded as a foolish and crazy idea. They found their man in a retired railroad conductor named Edwin Drake.
This week marks the 150th anniversary of the success of effort by the "crazy Yankee" to find oil.
This excerpt from Daniel Yergin's Pulitzer Prize winning, The Prize: the Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (updated 2009), picks up the story:
The “Colonel”
Their candidate was one Edwin L. Drake, who was chosen mainly by coincidence. He certainly brought no outstanding or obvious qualifications to the task. He was a jack-of-all-trades and a sometime railroad conductor, who had been laid up by bad health and was living with his daughter in the old Tontine Hotel in New Haven. By chance, James Townsend, the New Haven banker, lived in the same hotel. It was the sort of hotel where men gathered to exchange news and shoot the breeze, a perfect setting for the thirty-eight-year-old Drake, who was friendly, jovial, and loquacious, and had nothing else to do. So he would pass the evenings entertaining his companions with stories drawn from his varied life. He had a vivid imagination, and his stories tended to be dramatic, exaggerated tales, in all of which Drake himself played a central, heroic role. He and Townsend talked frequently about the rock oil venture. Townsend even persuaded Drake to buy some stock in the company. Townsend then recruited Drake himself to the scheme. He was out of work and thus available, and since he was on leave as a conductor, he had a railroad pass and could travel for free, which was most helpful to the financially pinched speculative venture. He had another attribute that would be of great value: He could be very tenacious.
Dispatching Drake to Pennsylvania, Townsend gave him what turned out to be a valuable send-off. Concerned about the frontier conditions and the need to impress the “backwoodsmen,” the banker sent ahead several letters addressed to “Colonel” E. L. Drake. Thus was “Colonel” Drake invented, though a “colonel” he certainly was not. The stratagem worked. For a warm and hospitable welcome was received by “Colonel” E. L. Drake, when, in December of 1857, he arrived, after an exhausting journey through a sea of mud, on the back of the twice-weekly mail wagon, in the tiny, impoverished village of Titusville, population 125, tucked into the hills of northwestern Pennsylvania. Titusville was a lumber town, whose inhabitants were deeply in debt to the local lumber company’s store…. He returned to New Haven, intent on the much more daunting next step, drilling for oil.
“I had made up my mind,” he later said, that oil “could be obtained in large quantities by Boreing as for Salt Water. I also determined that I should be the one to do it. But I found that no one with whom I conversed upon the subject agreed with me, all maintaining that oil was the drippings of an extensive Coal field or bed.”
But Drake was not to be dissuaded or diverted. He was back in Titusville in the spring of 1858 to commence work….. He set up operations about two miles down Oil Creek from Titusville, on a farm that contained an oil spring, from which three to six gallons of oil a day were collected by the traditional methods. After several months back in Titusville, he wrote Townsend, “I shall not try to dig by hand any more, as I am satisfied that boring is the cheapest.”
But he begged the New Haven banker to send additional funds immediately. “…Money is very scarce here.” After some delay, Townsend managed to send a thousand dollars, and with it Drake tried to hire the “salt borers”—or drillers—that he needed if he were to proceed. But salt drillers had a reputation for extreme partiality to whiskey and frequent drunkenness, and he wanted to be very careful whom he hired….
The first couple of drillers he engaged simply disappeared or begged off. In truth, though they dared not tell Drake so to his face, they thought he was insane.
Drake knew only that he had nothing to show for his first year in Titusville, and the bleak winter was at hand… the investors back in New Haven fretted and waited. Finally, in the spring of 1859, Drake found his driller, a blacksmith named William A. Smith—”Uncle Billy” Smith—who came with his two sons…. The work was slow, and the investors in New Haven were becoming more and more restive at the lack of progress.
Still, Drake stuck to his plan. He would not give up. Eventually, Townsend was the only one of the promoters who still believed in the project, and, when the venture ran out of money, he began paying the bills out of his own pocket. In despair, he at last sent Drake a money order as a final remittance and instructed him to pay his bills, close up the operation, and return to New Haven. That was toward the end of August 1859.
Drake had not yet received the letter when, on Saturday afternoon, August 27, 1859, at sixty-nine feet, the drill dropped into a crevice and then slid another six inches….
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