In 50 or 100 years, when historians look back on the 20^th century, several things will stand out.  It was the century of world-wide total war.  It was the century of racial and national genocide.  It was the century of ideological competition.  It was “the American century”, when a new world order arose from the ashes of two world wars.

All of these characteristics are certainly appropriate descriptors of the 20^th century.  There is another, however, that may be just as important.  The 20^th century was the century of petroleum, and that century began with a loud explosive gusher on January 10, 1901.  On that day, workers pulled their well drill out of a hole a thousand feet deep.  After cleaning the drilling equipment, removing the clay and salt caked on the teeth of the drill bit, they began lowering the bit back down the drill pipe to continue exploration.  When the bit reached 700 feet, drilling mud began to boil up to the surface.  Seconds later, the drilling pipe shot out of the ground over a hundred feet into the air.  Then… nothing. 

After a minute of stunned, silent frustration, the workers began to clean up the debris.  Suddenly, a loud explosion was heard from deep inside the hole, and mud shot high into the sky.  A few seconds later, mud was followed by natural gas, and then greenish-black crude erupted to a height of 150 feet.  This was the first oil “gusher”, and it was more oil than anyone had ever seen in the history of the world.  For nine days, more than 3,500 barrels of oil gushed out of the hole each hour while workers toiled day and night on the dirty, dangerous job of capping the well.

Spindletop well site, mid-January, 1901

The oil field was named after the salt dome through which that first well was drilled:  Spindletop.  The first Spindletop well soon produced 100,000 barrels of oil per day, more than the entire production of every other well in America combined.  In the year 1900, Texas produced 836,000 barrels of oil.  In 1902, Spindletop alone produced over 17 million barrels of oil, 94% of the state’s total.  The first Spindletop well increased worldwide oil production by 20%.   Not just Texas and the United States, but the entire world entered a new era, one that was fueled by plentiful, cheap petroleum.

 Spindletop oilfield, early 20th century

Without petroleum, the innovations and tragedies of the 20^th century would have been impossible.  The automobile was invented in the late 19^th century, but that new mode of transportation would never become more than a plaything for the rich unless there were ample supplies of cheap gasoline to propel their internal combustion engines.  Prior to Spindletop, the primary use for oil was to serve as fuel for lamps.  It is no accident that Henry Ford founded his automobile manufacturing company just two years following the Spindletop gusher.  It is no accident that assembly line production of the Model T, the first mass produced car, was initiated the same decade as the Spindletop gusher.  It is no accident the first motorized airplane soared over the dunes of Kitty Hawk just two and a half years after the Spindletop gusher.

Nor, unfortunately, is it any accident that Great Britain cast its imperial glance toward the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers as Ottoman Turkish control of that oil-rich region crumbled during World War I.  It is no accident that one of the bloodiest battles in the history of the world took place during 1942 and 1943 in Stalingrad, a city strategically located near the Baku oil fields.  It is no accident that the attack on Pearl Harbor happened just a few months after the United States imposed a ban on oil exports to Japan, an act perceived by that nation as a threat to its survival as a world power. 

And it is no accident that even today most of America’s industrial output is directly related to the production of oil and the products that are fueled by that resource.

As much as anything else, it was oil, and access to it, that was the primary theme of 20^th century.  It defined that century, and its diminishing supply might define the current one.  Coal made the industrial revolution possible in the late 18^th and 19^th centuries, but oil changed the direction of the industrial revolution and made the fruits of its production available to virtually everyone.  Oil changed the world, and that change began 110 years ago today on a hill in southeast Texas called Spindletop.