![]() ![]() Estimates suggest that, at his peak, Rockefeller was worth the equivalent of $305 billion in 2006 dollars. Rockefeller was making so much money that paying off the politicians who regulated the industry amounted to just another business expense. Other men were building up monopolies too, like those that Andrew Carnegie and Philip Armour created in, respectively, the steel and meat industries. By 1875, he owned every major oil refinery in the United States. In his first twenty years of business, Rockefeller put the squeeze on and bought out any competitor that crossed his path. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil and the guy who wrote the book on how to operate a ruthlessly successful oil business. Well, the man who really turned the industry into the one we know today was John D. ![]() Fast forward to 2019, and more than 90 million barrels are being produced every single day. That day, Drake and Smith got around twenty barrels of oil out of the ground. What emerged was called “rock oil,” and it led to an industry that has become one of the most dominant powers in the world. ![]() Two men, Edwin Laurentine Drake and his hired assistant “Uncle Billy” Smith, managed to drill a hole and force a cast-iron pipe sixty-nine-and-a-half feet into the ground. It all started on a Pennsylvania farm in 1859. ![]() In the United States, oil extraction got going in the late 1800s, with John D. ![]()
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