300 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
living result from a large per capita production of goods. The cul- 
ture of ancient Greece was founded on the labor of human slaves. 
Our high standards of living rest largely upon the mechanical work 
done for us by petroleum. The consumption of petroleum in this 
country provides us with the work equivalent of more than 4 billion 
able-bodied men laboring 8 hours a day, 6 days a week, year in and 
year out! In effect our petroleum provides us with an average of 
36 strong, able-bodied slaves for every man, woman, and child in the 
United States; for the average American family, petroleum does the 
work of a staff of 144 servants! 
This fortunate condition, America’s abundant supply of petroleum, 
is due, we are commonly asked to believe, to the fact that our country 
has been blessed with unusually rich natural resources of petroleum. 
This is a mistaken idea and to accept it is to ignore an even more 
precious heritage with which as a nation we have been blessed. 
We have produced more than 60 percent of the petroleum the 
world has consumed so far. But this does not mean that we possess 
60 percent of the world’s petroleum. Outside the United States ex- 
ploration for petroleum has hardly begun. The fact is that most of 
the really rich petroleum resources of the earth lie outside our na- 
tional boundaries. In comparison with them the quality of our do- 
mestic resources appears rather meager. The areas of first-class 
promise for petroleum over the earth’s surface aggregate some 6 
million square miles; of this total, about 15 percent, or less than 1 
million square miles, are included within the boundaries of the United 
States. When the petroleum resources of the earth have finally been 
fully developed it will probably have been established that less than 
15 percent of the total petroleum in the earth’s crust lay beneath the 
surface of the United States. 
What we in America have been blessed with is a native genius 
which, in combination with our political and social concepts, has en- 
abled us to explore for petroleum more effectively and to discover 
the hidden resources in our country more rapidly than any other 
people on earth. Our abundance of petroleum has come to us be- 
cause we dug down into the earth all over the land until we found it. 
No other nation has made any comparable effort to develope its petro- 
leum resources. 
To the task of oil finding, in addition to the method of applied 
science and a flair for industrial organization, we have brought the 
spirit of the pioneer. To an ingenuity which enabled us to design 
and operate the ponderous mechanical equipment required to drill 
and recover petroleum from wells of unprecedented depth, we have 
added the frontiersman’s characteristic risk-taking instinct. Driven 
by this instinct, equipped with this machinery, we have gone about 
