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“Oil is found in the minds of men.” So says a bumper sticker popular among petroleum engineers. True enough. In 1859, Colonel Edwin Drake struck oil in Pennsylvania by drilling, rather than digging, for oil; he adapted the old Chinese trick of drilling for salt. That prompted the world’s first oil boom, which inevitably led to bust as oil flooded the market and prices collapsed. In 1901, another set of unlikely innovators struck oil in unpromising terrain near Spindletop, Texas. They did so using novel drill bits that rotated through the earth, rather than merely pounding it repeatedly, and so reached far greater depths than were previously possible. That unleashed a ferocious gusher that spewed out hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil in days and marked the birth of the modern oil industry. Inevitably, this boom led to bust once again, as oil grew ever more plentiful. 

Excerpted from Page 86 of ‘Zoom: The Global Race to fuel the car of the future’ by Iain Carson and V Vaitheeswaran