"Colonel" Edwin Laurentine Drake established the petroleum industry in one fell swoop with his 1859 discovery of underground oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Prior to his discovery, petroleum saw few practical uses; afterward, its utility was recognized, and it became an important commodity for energy production. Drake proved inept in his business dealings, and he lost all his money to bad investments, dying in poverty.
Drake was born on March 29, 1819, in Greenville, New York. When he was still young, his family moved to Castleton, Vermont, where he attended the local schools. He worked on the family farm until the age of 19, when he left for Buffalo, New York, where he secured a job as a night clerk on a lake steamer. Over the next dozen years, he held a variety of other jobs, most of them related to the transportation industry in one way or another.
In 1850, Drake landed a position as a conductor on the New York & New Haven Railroad. When his wife died in 1854, he moved into a hotel in New Haven, Connecticut, where he crossed paths with James Townshend, one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, an outfit that harvested ground-seepage oil for use in medicinal preparations. When Drake resigned from his conductor’s job due to ill health in December 1857, Townshend (as shrewd a businessman as Drake was an incompetent one) recognized an opportunity. Drake retained rights to free passage on the rail lines, so Townshend contracted him to travel to northwest Pennsylvania to investigate oil deposits at its property in Oil Creek as a representative of the company in which he now held stock.
Rail tracks connected New Haven to Erie, Pennsylvania, but Drake completed the rest of his journey to Titusville in a stage coach that traveled over smooth roads the first 15 miles to Waterford, but the remaining 45 miles of mud-filled roads took two days to traverse. Town-shend’s letter of introduction addressed his envoy as "Colonel" Edwin Laurentine Drake (who had never served in the military) to impress the local populace. In Titusville, Drake met George Bissell, another principal in the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company.
Through his extensive travels, Drake had observed the drilling of artesian water wells and salt wells in New York and Pennsylvania. He applied this notion of drilling to the collection of oil, an idea that excited Bissell, as he had read research by Benjamin Silliman identifying petroleum as a potentially valuable commodity. Bissell established the Seneca Oil Company, with Drake installed as president, to search for oil by drilling. Drake leased land and set up a drill, powered by an old steam engine, in 1858; by then, he had moved his family to Titusville (he had remarried in 1857).
On August 27, 1859, after three-and-a-half months of drilling, Drake struck oil at the depth of 69.5 feet. This date effectively marks the beginning of the petroleum age. Drake’s drill, constructed by a local blacksmith with salt-well experience, pumped only 40 barrels of oil a day at the height of its productivity (decreasing to 15 barrels a day later). Unfortunately, Drake neglected to patent the key innovation of his drill—a pipe encasing the drill in a protective layer—and others soon used his drilling technique to discover and extract huge quantities of oil, thereby establishing the petroleum industry.
In 1860, the town of Titusville appointed Drake as justice of the peace, a position with a salary of $3,000 a year. He worked concurrently as an oil commission merchant for a New York company. In 1863, he sold his Titusville property and moved to New York City, where he promptly lost his savings to bad investments. At this point, he was suffering from a disease that paralyzed his legs. His wife began taking in boarders and sewing to earn enough money to keep the family afloat.
Hearing of his plight, some of Drake’s Titusville friends raised $5,000 to move the family back to town. In 1876, the State of Pennsylvania granted Drake an annuity of $1,500 a year to support his family. Drake, who established the industry that proved to be extremely lucrative, died a pauper on November 8, 1880, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
