Titusville

We'll see.

The UAW 629 in Titusville, Pennsylvania, those auto workers are ready for the show.

[upbeat music] Headed to the work now.

I'll be in Huntsville for the show tonight.

And it's-

Oil City and Titusville.

And it's right at the height of the foliage season too, right?

It is peak foliage.

They were angry.

They thought this was a political move by the Saudis, um, uh, to basically make it, put their thumb on the scale in the midterm elections.

I think you had written about that in part of the article that you produced up in Titusville.

Yeah, in "The Liberal-

His only qualifications were a dash of pioneer blood and a great persistency in undertakings which interested him.

Whether Drake came to Titusville ordered to put down an artesian well or not is a mooted point.

His latter-day admirers claim that the idea was entirely his own.

It seems hardly credible that men as intelligent as Professor Silliman, Mr. Bissell, and others interested in the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company should not have taken means of finding out how the familiar Keir's Rock Oil was obtained.

Indeed, in his report, he speaks of wells sunk for the purpose of accumulating the product.

In the American Journal of Science for 1840, of which he was one of the editors, is an account of a famous oil well struck near Burksville, Kentucky about 1830 when drilling for salt.

It seems probable that the idea of seeking oil on the lands leased by the Petroleum Rock Oil Company by drilling artesian wells had long been discussed by the gentlemen interested in the venture, and that Drake came to Titusville with instructions to put down a well.

It is certain at all events that he was soon explaining to his superiors at home the difficulty of getting a driller, an engine house and tools, and that he was employing the interval in trying to open new oil springs and make the old ones more profitable.

It says, "In 1859, Robert Chesebrough, a chemist who formerly clarified lamp oil from sperm oil, a waxy oil from the heads of sperm whales, [laughs] was losing business as whale oil was replaced by petroleum-derived coal oil.

He traveled to the oil fields in Titusville, Pennsylvania to research what new materials might be created from this new fuel.

Then he learned of a residue called rod wax [laughs] that had to be-

Yeah

I mean...

And it's Titusville, mate.

I mean, it's the same as...

Yeah,

But she didn't want to go down that path, probably because, you know, her father was he had invented some type of oil barrel machine.

This all took place in Titusville, Pennsylvania.

Many people don't know that was the birthplace of oil as we know it.

The first oil

And what's interesting here is now the supplier base has expanded from two firms to four.

And they added the Faxon Machining of Cincinnati and the Grand Valley Manufacturing of Titusville, Pennsylvania.

So there's four new people involved.

Four American companies bid on forging a 20-foot monolithic steel penetrating case.

In the town of Chester, Mad Anthony Wayne drilled his troops in an unusual manner in the courthouse square.

The western part of the state was rife with forests, game, trout streams, and beneath it, the silent flow of oil to be discovered 50 years later in Titusville, of all places.

A dominion of wealth, discovered and as yet undiscovered, of history, made and as yet unmade.

To prove my point, a person by the name of Barbara Fritchie, who was born in old Heidelberg Township, had not quite yet been born.