From Oil Creek to Georgetown

On August 27, 1859, "Colonel" Edwin Laurentine Drake, after 19 months of difficulties, brought in the first gusher at Oil Creek, near Titusville, Pennsylvania, tapping into a natural reservoir of petroleum at a depth of 69 feet below the earth's surface. Over the past 140 years oil has become not only a lubricant and a source of power, but the raw material for a host of synthetic products, and the international trade in crude oil plays an important role in global politics. The history of that development is chronicled in detail in a recent gift to the library, the Bernard J. Picchi Petroleum Collection, donated by its creator, a 1971 graduate of the School of Foreign Service, longtime member and former chairman of the Library Advisory Council.

Among the approximately 700 books, journals, and other items in the collection are a number of items of outstanding interest and importance, ranging from J. H. A. Bone's self-explanatorily titled Petroleum and Petroleum Wells. What Petroleum Is, Where It is Found, and What is Used For; Where to Sink Petroleum Wells, and How to Sink them, Philadelphia, 1865 (second edition, much enlarged), to Cone and Johns' Petrolia: A Brief History of the Pennsylvania Petroleum Region, Its Development, Growth, Resources, etc., from 1859 to 1869, New York, 1870, an indispensable and reliable source on the early oil industry, to the massive The Derrick's Handbook of Petroleum, Oil City, 1898, a 1,062-page compendium edited by Peter C. Boyle, to the first edition of the definitive work on the early period of the science of petroeum, The Science of Petroleum, London, 1938, four volumes written by A. E. Dunstan and others.

The collection includes a great deal on the development of the oil industry world-wide, as well as in this country, the earliest foreign contribution being Alphonse Rey's L'Huile de pétrole, Geneva, 1865, only one copy of which is recorded in an American library. The illustration on this page shows the collection's only excursus into fiction, the rare first printing in the first printing dust jacket of the account of Tom Swift's invention of a new drilling method and his thwarting of the schemes of a trio of shady oil speculators. Ephemeral items in the collection include a variety of pamphlets including oil company prospectuses, advertising brochures, and the anonymous Petrolina Family Recipe Book, New York, ca. 1884, not a cookbook but a paean to Binghamton Oil Refining Company's line of patent medicine products. Of more purely visual interest are a group of early stereoviews of the Pennsylvania oil region and a small collection of early and handsome oil company stock certificates.