Tortured by restless and inventive energy, which age and disappointment and betrayal have not sufficed to snuff out, his continuous word is: "I want to make oil." When petroleum from the new wells began to come to New York, dozens of little stills were built all over the Jersey flats, many of them by Jews and Greeks. "Stills kept burning up all around," he says to his visitor. "Almost every day there was an explosion somewhere from the gases. I told my wife to give me my oldest clothes and send me my meals. I was going to find out all about this business. There was a pile of roofing-gravel under a shed by my stills. I went there and slept and ate, day and night, and watched the stills and the pipes, the gases, the oils, and all. All the sleep and rest I had for months was there. It was while watching these work that my greatest idea came to me, of making oil by a continuous process, so that I could feed in petroleum at one end and have kerosene running out at the other in an unceasing stream, day after day, without stopping the whole establishment, as the oil-refineries still do, every day or two, to cool off and clean up. By the old process, still in use, when the charge in the still of perhaps 1000 barrels had been refined, we had to draw the fires and wait perhaps ten hours--the best part of a day--for the still to cool off, so that the men could go in with iron chisels to chop it all loose and clean it out. This would take four or five men from four to six hours. The still would be idle for a day and a half, and then the same process would have to be gone through with again with every charge. All over the flats the Jews and Greeks kept burning up. The Common Council of Jersey City said we must stop refining. The rest joined a great combination to fight the Common Council, but I made up my mind to go where the oil was produced. I went to Titusville in 1865. I had all the money I could want. Some rich men told me to draw on them up to $100,000 for anything there was 'snacks in' for them." This was about the time the founders of the oil combination began in Cleveland, with "no money."