BOOM THEN BUST The oil town--Pithole, Pa. Pithole, PA         Pithole, PA  is  a n example of just how quickly a particular location could go boom and bust.    In January of 1865 a farm on Pithole Creek sold drilling rights for $100,000.    By the end of December 1865, Pithole, PA was a city of 15-20,000 people (estimates vary)!    It boasted the third busiest post office in Pennsylvania, 54 hotels, almost as many brothels, a large theater and numerous saloons and boarding houses.      In October 1865   Pithole was also the site of the first oil pipeline.      By December 1866, only a few thousand people were left.        Six years later, Pithole was a ghost town. Oil wells in Pennsylvania in 1862    Notice how close the wells are. The wood barrels are to store oil, but a standard barrel size had not yet developed.      ...

  The Oil Rush of 1859 Drake's first oil well      The discovery of oil in western Pennsylvania was as spectacular as the discovery of gold in California. The oil rush is not so well known since the Civil War overshadows it.    Even so, the frenzy long outlasted the gold rush and yielded more dollars.     By late 1864, drilling rights were being sold for $100,000.      By the end of January 1866, rights were sold at from $1million to $2 million.      Not only was oil good for making kerosene, advocates claimed, it was unsurpassed as a medical cure all.  The Oil Excitement — the Jeffersonian, PA December 8, 1859             The oil fever is raging in portions of Western Pennsylvania. An exchange published in the Crawford county, and especially in the vicinity of Oil Creek, the fever is epidemic. Everybody is more or less affected, and the attention of the pe...

  It’s 1859--Let’s Get Fracking!      The recent rush for underground energy called “fracking” and its attendant environmental consequences has happened before.      Demand for cheaper lighting, not the automobile, drove the first oil boom.       In 1859 when the first successful oil well started producing near Titusville, Pennsylvania, speculators rushed in to buy drilling rights on farms throughout the area. Small farmers were offered more money than they ever expected to see in their lifetime.     Many of the farmers found their land damaged or ruined by oil wells which spewed salt water and oil spills into surrounding streams and rivers.   Farmers downstream from the area suffered the effects too without ever receiving any money.      You might wonder why would petroleum be valuable in era before the automobile? Petroleum had little to no commercial value until a serial entrepreneur and invent...

          The Emancipation Proclamation  "One Last Card" by John Tenniel appeared in the October 1862 issue of the British satire magazine Punch ( Tenniel later became famous as the first illustrator of Alice in Wonderland) Emancipation Proclamation             Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was not a straightforward freeing of all slaves. In fact, it pleased nobody except those held in bondage behind Confederate lines on whom it had no effect. It was not meant as a humanitarian gesture, rather as an attempt to entice states in rebellion to rejoin the Union.               It was a political ploy which did not work as intended.             Lincoln waited to issue the proclamation until the Union had won a great military victory—and Union victories were few and minor until Se...

  No Home Should Be Without One! Ads from the back pages of Harper's Magazine in the late 1850s and Other Inventions. “No Home Should Be Without One,” my father used to grate sardonically whenever something useless or absurd was advertised in print or on TV. But in my latest blog entry of the same name, I look at what we take for granted today might have seemed silly then. Rubber bands advertised as "Elastic fasteners for bundling ballots" (too many or too few Russian rubber bands in the last election?!); “Paraffine Cream” for dry skin—we call Vasoline ®; ice cream freezers; “Sanitary Patented Diapers”—How’s that for a change? (sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun.)  Not to mention kitchen ranges, portable heaters; steam heat installed in your home and floor vents designed to go with your wall or ceiling tiles.  Plus the “best peacock feathers to brush away flies,” and, presumably, keep them brushed away.  Notice, the ad promises eight different sizes of ranges; it ca...

  The Patent Office's History of the Invention of Clothes Pins Improved Subway Train 1862 SMOKE CONSUMING LOCOMOTIVE—The Subterranean railway in London is traveled by a newly invented engine, which, while in open air, works like a common locomotive, but when in the tunnel, consumes its own smoke, or rather makes one, and by condensing its own steam, gives of not a particle of vapor. It is stated that on a trial trip, as long as this engine remained in open air it fizzed and simmered like any other locomotive; but the instant it entered the tunnel it condensed its steam, and scarcely a mark of vapor was perceptible, while from its flues into the smoke box being damped, not the least smell of smoke was given off—not even the most distant lamps down the side of the tunnel were dimmed in the slightest degree.   Life Size  Daguerreotypes   Oct 23, 1853 Weekly Placer (CA) Mr.  Mayall, in England, has succeeded, after much study, in producing daguerreotype ...