"What makes I found in Titusville!" continued Van Syckel. "I went all up and down the creek. They were glad to get 65 gallons of kerosene out of 100 gallons of petroleum, while I could get 80. I think the head of the oil combination had a little still cocked up in the woods there--a one-horse, pig-pen kind of a place at the bend of the creek, a cobbled-up sort of a mud-hole, with a water-trough to bring the oil to the still. He was not there himself; he stayed in Cleveland. I didn't ever think anything about him then. I was 'way above him. I first saw him some years after, about 1872, in a refiner's office. He was talking up some scheme he had for a combination of refineries. He said he didn't want to have the market overstocked. He was just a common-looking kind of a man among the rest of us there. I saw, when I reached Titusville, that the most money was to be made in shipping oil. I made a dollar a barrel, and in six months I was $100,000 in pocket. The land speculation I wouldn't touch. It was wild. It scared me to see men sitting around on logs, and trading off little pieces of land for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was the first man to lay a pipe line to carry oil up and down the hills of Pennsylvania." "The first successful pipe line," says the United States Census Report of 1885, "was put down by Samuel Van Syckel, of Titusville, in 1865, and extended from Pithole to Miller's Farm, a distance of four miles."[342] "When I first came to the oil country all the oil had to be teamed from the wells to the railways, over roads with no bottom in wet weather. Sometimes a line of teams a mile long would be stuck in the mud. Often the teamsters would dump their load, worth $5 a barrel, and abandon it. Mules would get so discouraged that they would lie down and die in the roadway before they could be helped. The teamsters knew their power. They charged accordingly. They charged for looking at the oil to see how many barrels their teams could draw. They charged extra for every mud-hole they struck, and if the wagon-wheels went to the hubs they doubled their bills. I paid $2 to $4 a barrel for teaming, and was shipping 4000 barrels a week. The teamsters were making more money than the well-owners, and didn't care whether they hauled oil or not. All this set me to thinking. I hit on the pipe line idea, and announced that I would carry the oil by pipe from the wells to the railroad. That was too much for the people of the oil regions. Everybody laughed me down. Even my particular friends, with whom I used to take my meals at the hotel, jeered and gibed me so that I took to coming and going through the back door and through the kitchen, and ate by myself. 'Do you expect to put a girdle around the earth?' was the favorite sarcasm. I knew it would cost a great deal--$100,000 perhaps; but I had the money. I built it--two two-inch lines, side by side--between June and November in 1865, and turned the oil in. The pipe was a perfect success