was obtained from salt water by means of artesian wells. This
salt water usually came to the surface contaminated with that
same evil-smelling oil which floated so constantly on top of the
rivers and brooks. The salt makers spent much time and money
"purifying" their water from this substance, never apparently
suspecting that the really valuable product of their wells was
not the salt water they so carefully preserved, but the petroleum
which they threw away. Samuel M. Kier was originally a salt
manufacturer; more canny than his competitors, he sold the oil
which came up with his water as a patent medicine. In order to
give a mysterious virtue to this remedy, Kier printed on his
labels the information that it had been "pumped up with salt
water about four hundred feet below the earth's surface." His
labels also contained the convincing picture of an artesian
well--a rough woodcut which really laid the foundation of the
Standard Oil Company.

In the late fifties Mr. George H. Bissell had become interested
in rock oil, not as an embrocation and as a cure for most human
ills, but as a light-giving material. A professor at Dartmouth
had performed certain experiments with this substance which had
sunk deeply into Bissell's imagination. So convinced was this
young man that he could introduce petroleum commercially that he
leased certain fields in western Pennsylvania and sent a specimen
of the oil to Benjamin Silliman, Jr., Professor of Chemistry at
Yale. Professor Silliman gave the product a more complete
analysis than it had ever previously received and submitted a
report which is still the great classic in the scientific
literature of petroleum. This report informed Bissell that the
substance, could be refined cheaply and easily, and that, when