Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 1.djvu/49

Rh Franklin, the Oil Creek road became the feeder of the former principally. Both of these roads were completed to Oil City by 1865.

The railroads built, the vexatious, time-taking, and costly problem of getting the oil from the well to the shipping point still remained. The teamster was still the tyrant of the business. His day was almost over. He was to fall before the pipe-line. The feasibility of carrying oil in pipes was discussed almost from the beginning of the oil business. Very soon after the Drake well was struck oil men began to say that the natural way to get this oil from the wells to the railroads was through pipes. In many places gravity would carry it; where it could not, pumps would force it. The belief that this could be done was so strong that as early as February, 1862, a company was incorporated in Pennsylvania for carrying oil in pipes or tubes from any point on Oil Creek to its mouth or to any station on the Philadelphia and Erie Railroad. This company seems never to have done more than get a charter. In 1863 at least three short pipe-lines were put into operation. The first of these was a two-inch pipe, through which distillate was pumped a distance of three miles from the Warren refinery at Plumer to Warren's Landing on the Allegheny River. The one which attracted the most attention was a line two and one-half miles in length carrying crude oil from the Tarr farm to the Humboldt refinery at Plumer. Various other experiments were made, both gravity and pumps being trusted for propelling the oil, but there was always something wrong; the pipes leaked or burst, the pumps were too weak; shifting oil centres interrupted experiments which might have been successful. Then suddenly the man for the need appeared, Samuel Van Syckel. He came to the creek in 1864 with some money, hoping to make more. He handled quantities of oil produced at Pithole, several miles from a shipping point, and saw his profits eaten up