THE EVOLUTION OF THE OIL INDUSTRY [Illustration: The first oil well drilled near Titusville, Pa., on August 27, 1859, by Col. Edwin L. Drake, the pioneer man of the world] THE EVOLUTION _of the_ OIL INDUSTRY BY VICTOR ROSS ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1920 COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN PREFACE BY DR. VAN H. MANNING _Director of the Division of Technical Research of the American Petroleum Institute. Formerly Director of the Bureau of Mines of the Department of the Interior_ A glance at the chapter headings in this little book shows that it is an endeavour to present in succinct form a survey of a great and ever-expanding economic revolution--the interpenetration by petroleum of all industries, whether of the factory or the field, land or sea, war or peace. This phenomenon has been almost exclusively a development of the past six decades, and the United States of America have been the predominant factor in the innumerable changes wrought thereby. The narrative confines itself rigidly to historic records and material facts, undeniably romantic in themselves. But as the epic unfolds itself, it assumes a super-phase, the import of which cannot be measured by mere figures--a super-phase with invaluable applications to the problems of humanity in an industrial age. Petroleum, it becomes clear, was the first natural product to which the abstract theory of order, as understood by modern social philosophers, was applied in a large and general sense. It must be accounted good fortune not only for America but for the world at large, that this movement, though gradual at the outset, commenced almost within a decade of the birth of the modern petroleum industry at Titusville, Pa., in 1859. The outcome has tended to influence economic thought the world over, especially since war on an unprecedented scale put all established systems, traditions, and institutions to the acid test.