"Oil is found in the minds of men." So says a popular bumper sticker in America's oil patch. There is something in that. Daniel Yergin, author of "The Prize", a Pulitzer prize-winning history of oil, argues that the history of oil is one of astonishing innovations. In 1859, Colonel Edwin Drake struck oil in Pennsylvania by drilling rather than digging, adapting the old Chinese trick of drilling for salt. That prompted the world's first oil boom, which inevitably led to bust as oil flooded the market and prices collapsed.
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