27 August 2003

Titusville

It is a slow news day. There was a stampede at a Hindu religious festival in western India. The dust has only begun to settle on the terrorist bombings in Bombay. I can't get used to calling it "Mumbai," which is what the government wants to do to ease English out as the national lingua franca. It was hot and slow at the office and I went over to the Naval Station on the wrong side of the Anacostia River and got my retired ID card from the Navy. I looked at the words on it. "Retired." I am just about out on the street with my suitcase and porkpie hat. Twenty-seven years of government service gone by just like that.

The report of the investigation into the Colombia Shuttle disaster is out and the conclusions are pretty blunt. I have a cousin who works for NASA is one of the few who has been asked to stay on and salvage the program. His recommendations are in Chapter Six, if you are looking. Seems that the Agency wasn't paying enough attention to safety. Like what they do isn't the most amazing and dangerous thing in the world. The energy required to get one of those flying bricks into the air would be enough to power Mumbai for a week. I had to listen to the reports about it on the battery radio in my apartment because there was a hell of an electrical storm that roared through here late yesterday afternoon. Our building was knocked off the grid for several hours and several neighborhoods are still out this morning. Thank God I had made ice the night before and had batteries for the radio. I suppose there is something to be said for the all-hazards approach to the Global War on Terrorism. Which is, of course, fueled by oil money. And that is the reason American companies have been tramping all over Arabia for the last eighty years. I often wonder what it would be like today if we weren't in hock to the Sheikdoms up to our eye-balls, our government wasn't commanded by Texas oilmen, and there really wasn't any money for mad despots to buy rockets and weapons of mass destruction. Then there would be no reason at all for crusades to secure democracy and the orderly flow of oil.

But of course the oil wasn't found in Arabia first, and the wild economic cycles did not start with OPEC. The oil business is as American as apple pie, and just as tough and leathery as a Texas wildcatter. It was on this day in 1859, hot and clear, that Colonel Edwin L. Drake brought in the first successful U.S. oil well just south of Titusville, Pa.

So I suppose we can blame him for everything that happened afterwards. Titusville, PA, (pop. 6,400) is the birthplace of the modern Oil Industry, though it never profited much from it. There is a roadside attraction there. Today, Titusville is a speed-bump on Hwy-8 in the wilds of northwestern Pennsylvania. But it wasn't always that way. For a couple minutes it was as rip-roaring as Cripple Creek or the other towns of the Gold Rush. Col. Edwin Drake believed he could adapt the techniques of the salt-drilling trade to explore for oil. He got driller Uncle Billy Smith's to set up his rig on some likely land near Oil Creek and brought in the gusher that made our modern world possible.

The oil was there for the taking, and everyone knew where it was. They just were not quite sure what to do with it. Since pre-historic times it had seeped up in Oil Creek and was captured for a variety of purposes. Hikers hated it because it got all over their boots.

There had been many attempts to retrieve oil from the east side of the creek. Native Americans had dig pits to allow the crude to accumulate, and with the coming of the white settlers the seep oil was used by Brewer and Watson's sawmill for lighting and lubrication of their machinery. The crude was used as a patent medicine. The locals called it Seneca Oil, since the Seneca Indians, one of the six tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, claimed there were healing properties in the slippery golden crude.

Joel D. Angier from Titusville leased the seep from Brewer and Watson on the Fourth of July in 1853. It was the first commercial oil lease in history. At that time, the lamps of the new nation were still burning on the pure oil drained from the reservoir behind the blow-holes of sperm whales. Angier never was able to collect enough oil to make it commercially viable and went bust. But his efforts, and word that oil was coming from some salt drillings in the region began to attract the interest of investors from New York City.

A local farmer with property on the lower portion of Oil Creek was harvesting crude passively, an environmentally sound means of collection. He put a ring of timbers and baffles in the creek that was not unlike the containment booms used today to restrict spills. If you want to think Jed Clampett and his "bubbling crude" you wouldn’t be far wrong. The farmer claimed he could capture twenty to thirty barrels in a season in his rig, and that was the largest petroleum operation in the country and possibly the world. In 1854, a New York city-slicker from the nascent oil business visited the area, but the farmer wanted $7000 for the seep, and that required deeper pockets than the city man had.

Seeing the oil coming to the surface of the creek all by itself was enough for the speculators back east, though. The price was determined by the market, just as it is now, and it is not just supply and demand. It is speculation and emotion, too. Somebody sneezes in Saudi and the price leaps twenty cents a gallon at the pump. A gent named Albert Crosby, acting as agent for George H. Bissell of New York, gave up on trying to dicker with the hard-headed farmer and turned his attention to the purchase of 100 acres adjacent to the property. Locals were astounded at the sale price of $5000 for land that hikers avoided to keep the greasy residue from collecting on their shoes.

When Drake's gusher came in it sparked a craze as frenzied as the Gold Rush on Sutter's Creek. Titusville was a lot easier to get to since prospective rough-necks did not have to take ship and sail around Cape Horn or walk across the Isthmus of Panama to get there. The incredible boom-and-bust cycle that began in Western Pennsylvania gave birth to the nearby Oil Creek Valley town with the picturesque name of Pithole. The population of that valley rocketed from nothing to 15,000 as speculators, con men, sutlers, bounders and prospectors poured into town. You can imagine the pandemonium. Hawkers and buyers, chumps and hard-eyed men on the muddy streets looking for their chance. Some of them got it but most did not. It is a tough business, wresting money from the earth. Pithole boasted 57 hotels soon after another oil strike in 1865 and briefly had the third-busiest post office in Pennsylvania. I imagine the hoteliers made out better than most of the would-be oil barons. By the next year the oil ran out and the town was virtually abandoned. All the wildcatters headed west, where someone thought the new territories liberated from Mexico might provide a man a chance at the big strike. That is the way of the business, after all. Quaker State, the mammoth oil refining conglomerate, left nearby Oil City (pop 12,000) for the barren plains of West Texas a couple years ago. It is all just economics, after all. Nothing personal.

I often wonder what Saudi Arabia is going to look like when their oil is gone. I expect they are planning for it already. But like I said, it is a slow news day. We get so up close to all the little awful things that are happening and forget why things are the way they are. The suddenly abundant supply of petroleum lit the lamps of America and the suddenly abundant petroleum provided inspiration to tinkerers all over the world. A Frenchman named J. J. Étienne Lenoir built a spark-ignition engine that could be operated continuously in 1859. In 1862 Alphonse Beau de Rochas, another Frenchman, patented a four-stroke engine; sixteen years later, Nikolaus A. Otto built a successful four-stroke engine. In 1885 Gottlieb Daimler constructed an engine with a vertical cylinder using gasoline injected through a carburetor, and four years later introduced a four-stroke engine with mushroom-shaped valves and two cylinders configured in a "V." With the addition of the electric starter, that is what we are driving around in our enormous SUV’s today. But that is a different story.

Oh, Colonel Drake died penniless. I just thought you should know.

I have to wrap this up and get out of here. I need to leave a little early because I have to stop at the gas station and top off my tank before the prices go up again. Things are a little unsettled where the oil comes from these days.