How the Oil Pipeline Began - Issue 50: Emergence
▻http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/how-the-oil-pipeline-began
Soon after Colonel Edwin Drake struck oil, 70 feet down, in Titusville, Pennsylvania, on Aug. 27, 1859, he had a problem. He had nowhere to store the dark green liquid, and no good way to move it. Until then, locals had collected smaller quantities of oil from seeps and puddles and pits, by wringing it out of saturated wool blankets and scraping it off of wooden boards and collecting it in buckets, and they stored it easily in washtubs and whiskey barrels. But Drake’s well produced 1,000 gallons a day, and subsequent wells produced much more. The nearest railroad was 16 miles to the north, in Corry, just shy of the New York border. The roads there, ill-maintained lumber trails, were barely passable. So, for half a decade, before the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad arrived from the (...)