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The deepest well ever drilled was put down at West Eliza- 
beth, near Pittsburg, by the Forest Oil Company, and was 5,530 
feet deep, or 250 feet over a mile. 
In the early days about a thousand wells a year were drilled, 
now the holes are going down at the rate of about a thousand 
wells a month. There have been something like 170,000 wells 
drilled for oil and natural gas in the United States. 
In 1901, the United States produced 53,000,000 barrels of 
illuminating oil. It is so easy to speak the word millions and so 
hard to really comprehend its meaning. Let us look at this vast 
volume in another way. If we put the oil produced into barrels, 
and then placed those barrels end to end, we have enough to reach 
all around the world and some to spare. After making a second 
row from New York to San Francisco we have not used all yet; 
so let us pile up what barrels remain one upon the other, and the 
top one is more than 10,000 miles above the earth. But this is 
really only about half the oil that was actually produced, for the 
fuel oils of California and Texas amounted to about 50,000,000 
barrels more. The Lucas well at Beaumont is estimated to have 
started off at 100,000 barrels a day. To store and handle this 
ocean of oil 2,000 iron tanks, as large as a circus tent, each hold- 
ing 35,000 barrels and 20,000 tank cars are required, also 150 
immense tank steamers to carry it across the seas to Europe, Afri- 
ca, India, China, Japan, and Australia. 
Because oil was first found under Oil Creek, the pioneer 
operators thought it was only to be found under water courses, 
and they drilled wild-cat wells on what they called surface indi- 
cations. After a number of years of this kind of experimenting, 
during which some oil fields had been found (more the result of 
accident than anything else) it was noticed that they had a gen- 
eral direction of northeast and southwest and that they ran on a 
forty-five degree line. The oil fields are not all on the same line 
for there may be any number of parallel forty-five degree lines, 
but the general trend is from northeast to southwest and they are 
about twice as long as wide. 
In drilling in wild-cat territory there is no one who can tell 
just where to drill as is proven by the fact that the men who 
