August 27 · This Day in America
On the banks of Oil Creek in northwestern Pennsylvania, a drill bit reaches sixty-nine and a half feet and stops. The next morning, the salt-well driller they call Uncle Billy Smith peers down the iron pipe and sees dark liquid floating on the water. Edwin Drake — broke, mocked, written off by his backers, who had already mailed the order to quit — has just brought up the first commercial oil well in the United States. Almost no one present understands what they are looking at. They think it is lamp fuel, a cheaper way to light a parlor. It is the engine of the next century: the cars, the highways, the airplanes, the plastics, the wars, the warming. Everything accelerates from this muddy creek bank. An entire age was about to be poured out of a Pennsylvania hillside, and it started with one stubborn man who would not stop drilling.
Source: www.acs.org
Also on this day · 1908
In a small farmhouse near Stonewall, Texas, in the Hill Country along the Pedernales River, a boy is born who will one day push the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act through a reluctant Congress, sign Medicare into law, and pour the nation's treasure and his presidency into Vietnam. The biggest, most contradictory of American figures, shaped forever by the hard, poor country he came from.
Source: npg.si.edu