The Men Who Drilled the world s first commercial oil well in 1859 near Titusville, Penn-sylvania, probably knew they had jobs that had never existed before, but it is a fair bet they had no inkling that they were on the brink of changing the world. The operation was derided by locals as Drake's Folly, after Edwin Drake, the former train conductor who oversaw the long-shot project. It took more than a year of false steps and trial and error for a drill to hit a pool of oil only 69 feet deep. Even afterward the impact of the strike was far from clear: The well soon went dry, and the drilling techniques Drake pioneered produced just 2,000 barrels of oil in the United States in that first year. But by 1900, production had reached 60 million barrels annually as world markets replaced wood and whale oil with petroleum and coal as the fuels of choice. For some, the transition was profoundly destabilizing.
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