How we got addicted to oil: 150 years after oil was first struck in Pennsylvania, the world is scrambling to find new--and less problematic--sources of energy.

• Author: Edidin, Peter
• Position: TIMES PAST

It's hard to imagine modern life without oil. And yet, as the Oil Age turns 150 this year, it's becoming clearer and clearer that this natural resource is both a blessing and a curse.

Refined into gasoline and jet fuel, oil has brought mobility to people everywhere and raised the standard of living around the globe. It also powers factories and is an ingredient in countless products, from cellphones and medicines to asphalt, plastics, and cosmetics.

But on the downside, carbon dioxide emissions from gas engines are a major cause of global warming; oil revenues have helped fund autocratic regimes as well as terrorist groups bent on killing Americans and other Westerners; and the earth's known oil reserves are starting to run thin.

A race is now on to end, or at least lessen, the world's dependence on oil. Indeed, finding alternative sources of energy was one of President Obama's campaign themes. "Breaking our oil addiction is one of the greatest challenges our generation will ever face," he said. "It's going to take nothing less than a complete transformation of our economy."

AMERICA'S ORIGINAL ENERGY CRISIS

It's not the first time Americans have found themselves scrambling to find new energy sources. In the 1850s, long before we became "addicted" to oil, the nation faced a shortage of another critical raw material: whale oil.

In Moby Dick, published in 1851, Herman Melville writes at great length about whaling, at the time one of America's biggest industries. The job of whalers, Melville wrote, was to find the oil "for almost all the ... lamps, and candles that bum round the globe." Whale oil produced the dearest and cleanest light, but a depleted whale population was forcing ships sailing from places like New Bedford and Nantucket, Massachusetts, to travel farther and farther to catch fewer and fewer whales.

Scientists began looking for other sources of light. A new technology for distilling oil from coal was one possibility, but it was expensive. Pure alcohol was another, but it was chemically unstable. And lard oil, which comes from pork fat, stank.

The answer came in 1853 from George Bissell, a 32-yearold New York lawyer. "More than anybody else, [Bissell] was responsible for the creation of the oil industry," writes Daniel Yergin in his history of the oil business, The Prize.

THE FIRST OIL WELL

Bissell, a Dartmouth College graduate, was visiting his alma mater in New Hampshire, where he was shown a bottle of something called "rock oil" (petroleum, in Latin). Bissell knew that this oozy stuff seeped into creeks in western Pennsylvania, where it was sold as a popular patent medicine to remedy everything from stomachaches to deafness. He also knew that it was flammable and realized, Yergin writes, "that it could be used not as a medicine but as an illuminant."

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Bissell found a few investors and sold shares in a company that would drill for oil in Pennsylvania. The company bought land near Titusville, a small town 100 miles north of Pittsburgh, and in 1857 it sent "Colonel" Edwin Drake, a former railroad conductor, to oversee the venture. (The investors invented Drake's rank to impress the 100 or so residents of Titusville.)

Within two years, Drake had failed to produce any...