He brought back a man, and after a few months more of experiments and accidents the drill was started. One day late in August, 1859, Titusville was electrified by the news that Drake's Folly, as many of the onlookers had come to consider it, had justified itself. The well was full of oil. The next day a pump was started, and twenty-five barrels of oil were gathered.
There was no doubt of the meaning of the Drake well in the minds of the people of the vicinity. They had long ago accepted all Professor Silliman had said of the possibilities of petroleum, and now that they knew how it could be obtained in quantity, the whole country-side rushed out to obtain leases. The second well in the immediate region was drilled by a Titusville tanner, William Barnsdall—an Englishman who at his majority had come to America to make his fortune. He had fought his way westward, watching always for his chance. The day the Drake well was struck he knew it had come. Quickly forming a company he began to drill a well. He did not wait for an engine, but worked his drill through the rock by a spring pole.[1] It took three months, and cost $3,000 to do it, but he had his reward. On February 1, 1860, he struck oil-twenty-five barrels a day-and oil was
- ↑ An elastic pole of ash or hickory, twelve to twenty feet long, was fastened at one end to work over a fulcrum. To the other end stirrups were attached, or a tilting platform was secured, by which two or three men produced a jerking motion that drew down the pole, its elasticity pulling it back with sufficient force, when the men slackened their hold, to raise the tools a few inches. The principle resembled that of the treadle-board of a sewing machine, operating which moves the needle up and down. The tools were swung in the driving pipe, or the "conductor"—a wooden tube eight or ten inches square, placed endwise in a hole dug to the rock—and fixed by a rope to the spring pole, two or three feet from the workmen. The strokes were rapid, and a sand pump-a spout three inches in diameter, with a hinged bottom opening inward and a valve working on a sliding rod, somewhat in the manner of a syringe-removed the borings mainly by sucking them into the spout as it was drawn out quickly. McLaurin's "History of Petroleum."
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