Peter Heath, age 13, Grand Forks, N.D., for his question:
WHO WERE THE FIRST TO USE PETROLEUM PRODUCTS?
Man has used petroleum products since ancient times. The first petroleum products used were those that seeped to the surface from underground springs.
The ancient Egyptians coated mummies with pitch made from natural asphalt. The ancient Chinese found natural gas while drilling for salt and used it for fuel as far back as 1000 B.C.
King Nebuchadnezzar used asphalt to build the walls and pave the streets of Babylonia in about 600 B.C. The Assyrians and the Persians also used asphalt to build their cities. Also in those ancient times, the boatmen on the Euphrates River made vessels of woven reeds smeared with asphalt.
American Indians used petroleum products hundreds of years before the white man came to the New World. The Toltec Indians of Mexico set mosaic tiles with a petroleum product called "bitumen."
Remains of ancient oil wells have been found in the oil regions of Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Ohio. No one knows how long ago these wells were dug, but trees hundreds of years old grew over some of them.
Jesuit missionaries in North America found Indians scooping up oil from surface pools in the early 1600s. The Indians used it for both fuel and medicine.
By 1750, many oil seepages had been found in New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, (which was then part of Virginia). Wells drilled for salt often produced oil as well. Salt makers generally regarded oil as a nuisance that interfered with salt production.
About 1847, Samuel Kier began bottling petroleum for medicine as a side line of his salt business in Pittsburgh, Pa. About this time, frontiersman Kit Carson collected oil from a seepage in Wyoming and sold it to pioneers as axel grease for their wagons.
In 1852, Abraham Gesner, a Canadian geologist, discovered the valuable petroleum product now called kerosene.
Some historians believe that Romania may have had the first oil industry. Romania produced about 2,000 barrels of oil in 1857.
In the old Romanian oil industry, workmen used bags and buckets to bring up oil from hand dug wells.
In 1857, James Miller Williams of Canada dug an oil well and established a refinery near present day Oil Springs, Ontario. He distilled and sold oil for lamps.
But most historians trace the start of the industry on a large scale to 1859 when Edwin Drake drilled his famous well near Titusville, Penn.
Drake struck oil at a depth of about 70 feet on Aug. 27, 1857. The oil rose to just below the surface. Drake put a pump on the well, which produced 10 to 35 barrels a day. His company sold the oil for $20 a barrel. As more oil was found, the price dropped to 10 cents a barrel in three years.
By the 1860s, the Pennsylvania hills flowed with oil. oilmen drilled thousands of wells. At first wagons and river barges carried the oil from the fields to the refineries. Soon railroads built branch lines to the fields. In 1865, Samuel van Syckel built the first oil pipeline.