THE REMARKABLE GROWTH OF THE OIL INDUSTRY IN THE UNITED STATES marvelous expansion of the petroleum busi ness in this country is without a parallel in the whole realm of industrial and commercial develop ment. It is a magnificent tribute to the success of American energy and ingenuity, in spite of the bitter criticism directed against it and the gen eral deliberate ignoring of its real importance. Periodic eruptions of worthless stock companies, swindling a class which is ever ready to be duped again, and the fact that a single small group of men has come to control nine tenths of the indus try, have been deemed sufficient reason for hurl ing invectives at the very mention of oil. But, whatever the moral or legal virtues of these cases may be, they do not in any way detract from the value of a product which stands so high on the list of our national resources.
Within the space of a single lifetime, easily with in the memory of the older generation to-day, the petroleum industry has grown from nothing to gi gantic size. Fifty years ago a group of men in New Haven were planning to send a railroad con ductor to seek for oil. Now over 50,000 wells are turning out millions of barrels of oil a year. From the narrow confines of Oil Creek Valley, in Penn sylvania, the industry has spread ever outward until it touches the four limits of the country, from Pennsylvania to California and from Texas to Alaska. A half dozen great fields, widely sepa rated and of different characters, support active operations in more than a dozen states. What was a local experiment in a few backwoods counties has grown to be a great industry of the whole nation.
In 1859 the entire output of petroleum was only 2,000 barrels; now over two hundred times that quantity is produced every day in the year—over 160,000,000 barrels in a twelvemonth. From the time Drake's well began to yield, in 1859, until the close of 1907, the total production for the forty eight years reached the stupendous figure of 1,800, 000,000 barrels. Such a quantity is so inconceiv able that it means nothing except through compari son. Allowing five and six tenths cubic feet for the average barrel of forty-two gallons, this quantity would fill a lake covering some hundred square miles and five feet deep. If stored in the ordinary 40,000-barrel cheesebox tanks, the tanks would make a solid line for over 700 miles. With the
whole quantity placed in the average-sized barrels lying end to end, the line would cover over 750,000 miles or much more than sufficient to form a con tinuous loop passing ten times around the earth at the equator, to the moon and back again.
Oil which had practically no general use half a century ago, even at home, now occupies an essen tial part in a host of industrial processes and finds its way into practically every civilized quarter of the globe. In the home use alone it has added enor mously to the wealth of the country, but it has not stopped there. Billions of dollars have been netted from its sale in foreign countries. In recent years it has brought from other nations of the world a return of $10,000 an hour for every hour in the day and every day in the year. Such unparalleled commercial development in so short a time is truly entitled to stand as one of the greatest of all the great events in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Yet the praises of oil are rarely sounded.
Like most other mineral industries, the expan sion of the petroleum business during the half cen tury of its existence has been in a series of great leaps and bounds as new productive areas have been successively discovered and developed. Sudden booms in new districts and rich strikes in old fields have marked the whole progress of oil history, so that where one yedr saw a production of only a few thousand barrels, the succeeding year might wit ness a production risen to millions of barrels in one sudden leap.
Everywhere the increase a hundred- or a thou sandfold in a few years has been a typical feature of the development as each field has entered on its period of important expansion. In the eighties it was Ohio; in the nineties, West Virgina and Cali fornia; and in the last decade, it has been Texas, Kansas, and Illinois. The production of fifty bar rels in Texas in 1895 had risen to over 28,000,000 ten years later ; and an industry yielding 200 bar rels in Illinois in 1902 has grown to a 24,000,000 barrel industry in five years. Such prodigious additions have sufficed to make the total produc tion of the country rise rapidly and with only occasional, brief downward turns. But success has been won and maintained only by the unfailing adherence to the oilman's creed—drill, drill un ceasingly in new fields and old.