In 1850 sperm oil, then commonly used in lamps, had become high-priced, owing to the failure of the New Bedford whalers, and cost $2.25 a gallon. Oil obtained by the distillation of coal was tried, but was also too costly--not less than $1 a gallon. It burned well, but its odor was frightful. The problem of a cheap and pleasant light was solved by James M. Townsend and E.L. Drake, both of New Haven. In 1854 a man brought to Professor Silliman, of Yale, some oil from Oil Creek, Pa., to be tested. His report was so favorable that a company was formed, which leased all the land along Oil Creek upon which were traces of the new rock oil. The hard times of 1857 came before any headway had been made, and the company tried to find some way of ridding itself of the lease. At this time Townsend, who knew something about the property, undertook to get possession. Boarding in the same house in New Haven was E.L. Drake, once a conductor on the New York & New Haven Railroad, who had been obliged to give up work on account of ill-health. Townsend proposed that as Drake could get railroad passes as an ex-employee, he should go to Pennsylvania and look into the property. He did so, and reported that a fortune might be made by gathering the oil and bottling it for medicinal purposes. Drake and Townsend organized the Seneca Oil Company. The oil was gathered by digging trenches, and was sold at $1 a gallon. Drake suggested that it might be well to bore for oil. A man familiar with salt-well boring was brought from Syracuse, and in 1850 the first well was begun at Titusville under the supervision of Drake. He was commonly considered by the neighbors to be insane. The work was costly and slow. When many months and about $50,000 had been spent, the stockholders in the company refused to go any further--all except Townsend, who sent his last $500 to Drake, with instructions to use it in paying debts and his expenses in reaching home. On the day before the receipt of this money--August 29, 1859--the auger, which was down sixty-eight feet, struck a cavity, and up came a flow of oil that filled the well to within five feet of the surface. Pumping began at the rate of five hundred gallons a day, and a more powerful pump doubled this flow. As this oil was worth a dollar a gallon, fortune was within sight. But the very quantity of the oil proved to be the company's ruin. Their works were destroyed by fire in the winter of 1859-60, and before they could be rebuilt, scores of other wells, some of them requiring no pumping apparatus, had been sunk in the neighborhood. The supply was soon far in excess of the demand, which was limited by the small number of refineries, the want of good lamps in which to burn the oil, and the attacks by manufacturers of other oils. Such was the effect of these causes that the new oil fell to a dollar a barrel, a price so low that it did not pay for the handling. The Seneca Oil Company was so much