John Caprio. age 10. of Portland. Oregon:

Who first discovered petroleum?

Petroleum is a fancy name for rock oil. And there is a great deal of this gooey oil in the rocks of the old earth. Chances are. countless people have stumbled upon it through the ages. We know the ancient Egyptians knew about it. They used it to make paper from papyrus leaves and to mummify their dead. In early times. the people around the Caspian Sea were terrified of their rock oil which often caught fire in the ground.

The American Indians used petroleum as medicine. Even the early settlers used it. They boiled it down to make Seneca Oil ‑ a famous cure‑all But about 100 years ago. rock oil started to come into its own. Those were the days of oil lamps. before gas or electricity had been put to everyday work. A lot of the oil used was whale oil. expensive and hard to come by. Then it was found that petroleum could be refined to make kerosene. For a time the worlds lamps burned with this refined rock oil.

But not for long. Petroleum was soon refined to make gasoline end lubricating oil. The wheels of the world began to turn on. rock oil. Experiments in tapping the world's oil began in Rumania in 1857. Two years later. the first oil well was drilled in America. Edwin L. Drake did it with the help of a brine well driller. America's first oil gushed up near Titusville in western Pennsylvania on August 27. 1859.