CARBON—LITTLE 253 
DEVELOPMENT OF PETROLEUM INDUSTRY 
There are still many stately homes in New Bedford and other New 
England towns to bear witness to the prosperity which the whaling 
industry once enjoyed. The perils which attended the long voyages 
of its hardy crews and sturdy ships were incurred in a search for 
carbon compounds for lighting and lubrication. The romance of its 
adventures as recorded in “Moby Dick” and the “Cruise of the 
Cachalot ” has since, however, been far exceeded by the greater ro- 
mance of petroleum. Where a kill of the whaler might yield 80 
barrels of oil, the wildcatter now brings in a discovery gusher pro- 
ducing thousands of barrels a day, and the world rushes in to share 
his fortune. 
Petroleum has been known from the earliest times and was, to some 
slight extent, used even by the ancients. Baku, famous in antiquity 
for its sacred fires, is now more famous for its forests of derricks 
pumping oil. Here was struck the Droojba fountain, from which 
2,000,000 gallons of oil a day spouted in a stem, 18 inches in diameter, 
to a height of 300 feet, with a roar which was heard for miles. Can 
any other industry offer such a spectacle or one presenting such poten- 
tialities of sudden wealth ? 
The great Roman architect, Vitruvius, writing in the time of 
Augustus, says: 
(Some waters) flow through such greasy veins of soil that they are over- 
spread with oil when they burst out as springs: For example, at Soli, a town in 
Cilicia, the river named Liparis, in which swimmers or bathers get anointed 
merely by the water. Likewise there is a lake in Ethiopia which anoints people 
who swim in it, and one in India which emits a great quantity of oil when the 
sky is clear. At Carthage is a spring that has oil swimming on its surface 
and smelling like sawdust from citrus wood, with which oil sheep are anointed. 
The real romance of petroleum began, however, in America on 
August 28, 1859, when the Drake well came into production near 
Titusville, Pa. It was further stimulated by the classic report of 
Prof. B. Silliman on the economic value of rock oil, in which, with 
marvelous prescience, he forecast most of the industrial applications 
of petroleum. 
The Drake well went down only 69 feet and yielded less than 30 
barrels a day. It led, however, to such feverish exploitation of the 
Oil Creek district that before 1863 the number of wells exceeded 350. 
Some of these had records, for a time at least, of 1,000 to 3,000 
barrels daily, and the market was so flooded with oil that 10,000,000 
gallons are estimated to have run to waste in the absence of pur- 
chasers. To-day we are producing more than 700,000,000 barrels 
from about 300,000 wells, the deepest of which is down more than 
7,500 feet. 
In the porous strata of the oil sands, and beneath a protective cap 
of impervious rock, the oil and gas accumulate under pressure from 
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