Prior to the discovery of nuclear decay, subsurface burning of oil and gas was considered a likely source of heat for volcanic activity. Extensive discussion regarding hydrocarbons can be found in the works of Neptunist Richard Kirwan and Plutonists James Hutton and John Playfair. The origin and nature of coal, petroleum and natural gas were significant factors in the Neptunism versus Plutonism debates of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which focused on the influence of heat in the process of rock formation. Another book, published in 1558 by Nicolò Zeno, contained a description by his ancestors, the Zeno brothers, of the first discovery of petroleum in the western hemisphere, in Nova Scotia, on their purported North Atlantic expedition in the 1390s, a century prior to Columbus. Petroleum literature expanded significantly in the 16th century, with extensive coverage of the topic in books written by Agricola, Biringuccio and Palissy. Much of the attention given by travelers, dating back to Marco Polo in the 13th century, was due to the visual effect of the enormous mud volcanoes driven by massive oil and gas seeps, and the fire worship temples with turrets fed by this gas. By the end of the 19th century, this region would become the world’s leading oil producer, as the very shallow original wells proved to overlie multiple giant oil fields. Previously within Persia, they were controlled by Russia after 1804 and are now part of Azerbaijan. The most widely known ancient oil fields were near Baku, on the Absheron Peninsula on the west coast of the Caspian Sea. Multiple travelers described this oil field development in the early 19th century, often in English because of the region’s British Empire status. In Burma (Myanmar), near the Irrawaddy River, an estimated 520 wells produced more than 500,000 barrels of oil per year for illumination, wood preservation and medicine. At the time of the Drake Well, an 1812 well in China held the world depth record at 3,000 feet. Since at least the 2nd century A.D., several thousand brine wells in China’s Sichuan region had been producing associated gas, which was distributed through bamboo pipes for street illumination and salt manufacture. Asphalt appeared to have been used for embalming Egyptian mummies, with material probably sourced from what the Greeks knew as Lake Asphaltites, known today as the Dead Sea. Early archaeologists found that it had been used as a mortar in building construction for the ancient city of Babylon, apparently produced at the town of Hit on the Euphrates River. Outcropping solid hydrocarbons, such as asphalt, had been used since antiquity. It was considered to be a major component of the “Greek fire” used in ancient naval warfare. Petroleum was described at multiple locations in eastern Europe and the Middle East by early Greek scholars such as Pliny the Elder and Herodotus, and it is mentioned several times in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. Oil and gas was known and collected at seeps by native populations around the globe, utilized for fuel, medicine, construction and other purposes, depending on the properties of the hydrocarbons. Many of the pre-Drake citations were listed in three early petroleum bibliographies, produced by Gulishambarov in 1883, Peckham in 1884 and Redwood in 1913. To date, I have captured more than 1,000 publications, with a comparable number of cited references I have yet to find, and in the process, I have uncovered many interesting topics. Knowledge of oil and gas in other regions was already significant before 1859, but much of it had been retired to the back shelves of libraries by the time the oil industry expanded to a global scale in the 20th century.Īs an out-of-control retirement hobby, I have worked at locating pre-Drake published references to hydrocarbons and collecting images of the relevant text. For the next three decades, industry activity and related literature were dominated by and centered upon Pennsylvania and adjacent states. Drake’s 1859 well in Pennsylvania initiated the rapid commercial growth of the petroleum industry.
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