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now pipe lines running to Buffalo, Baltimore, Cleveland, Toledo, 
Pittsburg, Chicago, and to the seaboard at Bayonne, New Jersey. 
In all over one hundred refineries are connected with the wells 
in various oil fields, requiring about 80,000 miles of pipe for 
transporting oil, and about 20,000 miles more for the use of nat- 
ural gas, making a total of 100,000 miles of pipe-line in the 
United States. 
The first oil operators were pioneers struggling with the 
dangers and difficulties incident to a new and unknown industry. 
They had no past experiences to guide them, and worked with 
crude and imperfect implements. As the industry increased in 
importance, there came improved methods, until to-day there is 
to be found a greater per centage of skilled labor among work- 
men who produce oil than in any other industry. It is also the 
best paid, as the drillers and tool dressers receive about five dol- 
lars a day. I wish I had the time to tell about some of the skill- 
ful things drillers do. Sometimes the tools get stuck down in a 
hole 2,000 feet below the surface, and cannot be loosened in any 
way. Formerly such holes were abandoned ; to-day only the tools 
are abandoned, the hole being switched over and drilled down at 
the side of the tools that are stuck. There are some 250,000 men 
engaged in the various branches of the oil industry. There are 
no labor unions and we never have a strike. Drilling deep wells 
is an art for the conditions and complications are constantly 
changing. ‘The casual observer has been heard to say, as he sat 
on the bellows in the derrick of the drilling well,—‘* How clumsy 
everything is.” That's so, they have to be heavy and strong; 
they are made for use not beauty. But they are perfectly adapted 
to the uses for which they are intended. There is so much money 
involved in the production of oil that the best American skill has 
been brought to bear upon the mechanical part of the industry. 
A machine that with the aid of skilled workmen is able to drill a 
hole six and one-quarter inches in diameter and over one-hundred 
feet deep in twenty-four hours, as is frequently done, is a triumph 
in mining engineering. It is an established fact that the drilling 
of wells about a mile deep in the solid rock is prominent among 
the wonderful mechanical achievements of modern times. 
