Shane Parrish
speaker
20,679 appearances
49 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 15 Sep
Shane Parrish’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.
Appearances
But Rockefeller kept pressing.
That was where the firm was at the end of August 1859.
Rockefeller was still just 20 years old, but already you can start to see something is different about him.
That very same month, in a township in western Pennsylvania, a man named Edwin Drake struck oil.
Drake had been hired by a small group of New Haven, Connecticut that suspected there were large amounts of crude petroleum in the rock under the Pennsylvania creeks.
They wondered if drilling for it, like they did for water, might just work.
It turned out they were right.
Drake's well, the first commercial oil well in the United States, hit at 69.5 feet underground.
By the next morning, a barrel and a half of crude sat in a tub at the foot of the well.
That's when the chaos started.
In a short time, it seemed like every man with a horse and shovel and a bit of money to risk became a wildcatter.
Butchers became drillers.
Bankers became drillers.
Land that had been worth a dollar an acre was changing hands now at thousands.
Wells were going in along the creeks faster than anyone could count them.
Prices for crude spiked and then crashed and then spiked again.
Fortunes were made and lost inside of a week.
And John D. Rockefeller was watching from a desk in nearby Cleveland.
He was 20 years old.
He owned half a commission house that handled produce from one of the most productive farm regions in North America.
Showing 1021–1040 of 20,679 · page 52 of 1034
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