Edwin L. Drake, a former railroad conductor hired by the Seneca Oil Company, successfully drilled the first commercially productive oil well in the United States near Titusville, Pennsylvania. The well produced about 25 barrels a day, triggering an oil rush that transformed Pennsylvania's economy and set the template for the modern petroleum industry, from wildcat drilling to pipeline transport.
Drake's well wasn't glamorous. He drilled through quicksand and rock using a technique borrowed from salt-well drillers, encasing the shaft in iron pipe to keep it from collapsing, an innovation that became standard practice. Locals had nicknamed the project 'Drake's Folly,' certain the eccentric investor was wasting his money chasing a substance previously skimmed off creeks for patent medicine.
Within a year of the strike, Titusville and nearby Oil Creek Valley became a boomtown chaos of derricks, mud, and speculation, drawing comparisons to the California Gold Rush. Barrels of crude were floated down the creek to refineries, and the region briefly produced more oil than the rest of the world combined.
Drake himself never patented his drilling method and died in poverty in 1880, while the industry he inaugurated eventually produced titans like John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, forever tying American economic and geopolitical power to petroleum.