As I say in the title, the best thing that could happen with the letter that George Bissell sent him to Edwin Drake It was… arriving late .
For many years the lighting of homes depended on candles made of wax or animal fat (tallow). The wax ones were better but much more expensive. The tallow ones were cheaper (the fat of almost all animals was used) but they were quickly consumed, their light was irregular and their smell was not very pleasant. Among those made with tallow, the ones with the best quality were those made with whale oil , also used as fuel for lamps. The "caviar" of whale oil was the spermaceti :whitish wax or oil that is also known as “sperm whale » (according to the English denomination of the sperm whale «sperm whale», but that has nothing to do with sperm) and that is present in the cavities of the skull of the sperm whale and in the vascularized fats of all whales. In the 19th century, there was a brutal increase in whaling due to the demand for oil.
In 1846 appears Abraham Gesner , a doctor from Nova Scotia, whose interest in geology allowed him to discover a process to extract a new product from coal... kerosene . Kerosene, also called coal oil, burned better and was cheaper than whale oil. In 1854 he settled in the United States, where he founded the North American Kerosene Gas Light Company on Long Island . . The demand was so great that the limited capacity of his company to produce kerosene became a problem… and this is where our protagonist, George Bissell comes into play. .
After a visit to the school where he had studied, Dartmouth College, he was struck by a bottle with a blackish liquid... it was mineral naphtha (petroleum) . A professor explained that it burned easily and was sourced from an area in western Pennsylvania where it naturally oozed to the surface. It was only used for medicinal purposes. After experimenting with oil, and obtaining kerosene, he only had to know if he could produce at such a level that he could cover the existing demand (a problem that Gesner could not solve). With borrowed money he founded the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company and he leased 105 acres in the area where he produced that product. He hired a group of drillers, commanded by Colonel Edwin Drake , and began to drill looking for pockets of oil just as he did with water.
With more problems than expected and after a year and a half of hard work, the funds ran out and the oil did not appear. Bissell's venture capitalists didn't want to lose any more money and turned off the tap. Bissell sent a letter to Drake to stop the drilling... but the letter was delayed. On August 27, 1859, a few days before the letter arrived, they found oil .
The world has changed since that day and the whales had a break.
Sources:OIL150, Wikipedia, At Home – Bill Bryson