All About Inventions and Discoveries
The Romance of modern scientific and mechanical Achievements

The Age of Oil 291 fully recouped the money he had laid out in this enterprise. There are smiling fields to-day in Penn- sylvania which fifty years ago were covered with a bewildering maze of derricks. But the oil gave out, the derricks were dismantled, destroyed, or decayed, and were finally uprooted to enable the once oil- soaked land to be brought under the plough. The maps of the oil region of Pennsylvania printed in the ’sixties offer quaint perusal to-day. The area is dotted with villages, towns, and humming centres born of the oil boom. But you will search the current map in vain for many of those communities. They have literally vanished from the scene, and are now nothing more than memories of strenuous times. But since Drake struck oil in 1859 the world has witnessed many frenzied oil rushes and booms. And the new oil-fields have been widely scattered, thereby testifying to the liberal manner in which Nature has distributed her reserves of this indispensable com- modity. To-day it is India; a year hence it is New Zealand ; then Russia, now Alaska, and so on. The booms and rushes swing from pole to pole in the manner of a pendulum. But each sensation merely reproduces the scenes witnessed in the vicinity of Oil Creek in 1859 upon a more or less elaborate scale, according to the character of the discovery. And Nature rewards the toilers in as strange a manner as she distributes her supplies. Thus, in some parts of Austria, the oil has to be literally torn from the ground ; it is too heavy or semi-solid to be pumped. In the Caucasus, Mexico, Borneo, and at many spots in the United States it pours from the earth, once its fetters of rock are broken down, in