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Show A YOUNG INDUSTRY On August 25, the American petroleum pe-troleum industry will celebrate its seventieth birthday. But three score years and ten an average lifetime, have passed since William B. Smith withdrew a bit from a hillside in Titusville, Penn., set up an iron pitcher pump, and started producing a heavy, black fluid from the earth. The work has given the people of the countryside a great deal of innocent in-nocent merriment; " the fact that a great industry had been born was realized by no one. Now the industry started by Drake and Smith employs 1,500,000 people. The once solitary oil well has 300,-000 300,-000 neighbors. The handful of people peo-ple who had a use for oil then has increased until it includes practi cally every American citizen. And of equal importance, the price of oil has dropped from the 1859 quotation of $16.50 per barrel, to less than $2.00. To visualize a world without oil is to visualize one minus automobiles, automo-biles, airplanes, tractors, gas engines, en-gines, modern ships, great oil' burning burn-ing factories, power plants and a thousand and one luxuries and necessities. ne-cessities. Oil did a lion's share in putting an end to the age of candles can-dles and wagons. Few Americans who drive up to any one of the tens of thousands of filling stations that dot our highways high-ways and receive high grade oil products pro-ducts at a low price, realize what has been accomplished by private in- itiative and enterprise in the oil industry in-dustry in 70 years. The story of oil is an integral part of our romantic history. |