Hard oiler : the story of early Canadian's quest for oil at home and abroad

The story of how the petroleum industry in Canada took root is described. The book retells the discovery and the quest for oil in the Sarnia area in 1858 when James Miller Williams and Charles Nelson Tripp struck oil at what was to be the world's first modern commercial petroleum operation. This set in motion a chain of events which resulted in the establishment of an industry on which life today is so heavily dependent. The circumstances that led to the discovery of petroleum in the midst of southwestern Ontario's last wilderness are described with special emphasis on the men and the women who were responsible for it. The book chronicles the role they played and the equipment they devised that led to a frenzy of land speculation, as well as to the training of a class of men who later introduced their expertise and equipment to new oil fields around the world to open up oil fields from Sumatra to the Ukraine, from the United States to Venezuela, and in the Middle East. In the latter part of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries no major oil field anywhere in the world was without its drillers from Lambton county in southwestern Ontario - the Hard Oilers. The story begins with the early discoveries in the 1840s, carries on with the golden age of Ontario oil, describes the part played by the Lambton county oilmen in opening up oilfields in distant parts of the world, and ends with an assessment of the latest discovery of the Hibernia fields offshore Newfoundland. refs., figs