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[[File:652px-First_Oil_Well.jpg|left|thumbnail|250px|Edwin Drake and his oil well]]
Even though there was no one "first discover" of oil. Oil was known in antiquity when it was used to heal wounds. But by the middle of the 19th century methods for collecting oil from the ground had not changed for thousands of years. Edwin Drake's oil fundamentally changed this process and dramatically increased oil production around the world. Instead of harvesting oil in a pail or sopping it up with rags and wrung out by hand over barrels, oil wells produced thousands of barrels of oil. The creation of the oil well fundamentally altered the course of the 20th century. <ref>American Chemical Society, “The Development of the Pennsylvania Oil Industry,” 2009.</ref>