Oil Industry

Dartmouth networking gave birth to the modern oil industry. It started with George Bissell 1845, who in 1853 was looking for cheap raw material to make kerosene. Bissell knew that small amounts of oil were a byproduct of salt drilling, and he wondered if drilling for oil itself would produce large quantities. A friend of Bissell's, Francis Brewer 1843, carried a sample of rock oil from Titusville, Pennsylvania, to Dartmouth chemistry professors Dixi Crosby and Oliver P. Hubbard, who analyzed the stuff in Crosby's home lab (now part of the Blunt Alumni Center). Yes, they said, the oil could be useful. So Bissell hired a prominent Yale chemist to tell them how to distill the crude into kerosene.

Bissell and Albert Crosby 1848 raised $526.08 to start a new company, bought the land the oil had come from, and sank an exploratory well. The chief driller: stockholder Edwin Drake, who struck crude in 1859, bringing on the oil rush.

While it is Drake who gets top billing in textbooks, it was Bissell "who more than anybody else was responsible for the creation of the oil industry," according to Daniel Yergin author of The Prize, a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of oil. Bissell took his anonymity all the way to the bank; he became the world's first oil magnate and a great Dartmouth benefactor (endowing his alma mater with, among orther things, its first gym).

The essence of oil: Bissell. Crosby, and the famous first well.