Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 1.djvu/31

CHAPTER ONE

THE BIRTH OF AN INDUSTRY

PETROLEUM FIRST A CURIOSITY AND THEN A MEDICINE—DISCOVERY OF ITS REAL VALUE—THE STORY OF HOW IT CAME TO BE PRODUCED IN LARGE QUANTITIES—GREAT FLOW OF OIL—SWARM OF PROBLEMS TO SOLVE—STORAGE AND TRANSPORTATION—REFINING AND MARKETING-RAPID EXTENSION OF THE FIELD OF OPERATION—WORKERS IN GREAT NUMBERS WITH PLENTY OF CAPITAL—COSTLY BLUNDERS FREQUENTLY MADE—BUT EVERY DIFFICULTY BEING MET AND OVERCOME—THE NORMAL UNFOLDING OF A NEW AND WONDERFUL OPPORTUNITY FOR INDIVIDUAL ENDEAVOUR.

 

ONE of the busiest corners of the globe at the opening of the year 1872 was a strip of Northwestern Pennsylvania, not over fifty miles long, known the world over as the Oil Regions. Twelve years before this strip of land had been but little better than a wilderness; its chief inhabitants the lumbermen, who every season cut great swaths of primeval pine and hemlock from its hills, and in the spring floated them down the Allegheny River to Pittsburg. The great tides of Western emigration had shunned the spot for years as too rugged and unfriendly for settlement, and yet in twelve years this region avoided by men had been transformed into a bustling trade centre, where towns elbowed each other for place, into which three great trunk railroads had built branches, and every foot of whose soil was fought for by capitalists. It was the discovery and development of a new raw product, petroleum, which had made this change from wilderness to market-place. This product in twelve years had not only peopled a waste place of the earth, it had revolutionised the world's methods of

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