The first oil well in the world

Abstract

In the recent article (1) entitled “The Art of Distillation and the Dawn of the Hydrocarbon Society” published in the Bulletin for History of Chemistry, the author states that Edwin L. Drake (1819-1880) drilled at Titusville, Pennsylvania a well that produced crude oil on August 27, 1859. “Thus the oil industry began as we know it today.” In this connection, the present writer would like to point out that the oil industry actually began one year earlier in 1858 when the Canadian entrepreneur James Miller Williams (1818-1890) (Fig. 1) drilled and successfully produced oil in the township of Enniskillen between Lake Erie and Lake Huron near the town later named Oil Springs in what is now Southwest Ontario.