Simon Mattacks
speaker
2,982 appearances
18 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard yesterday
Simon Mattacks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 15 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And then in 1901, a British businessman decided to fund a search for oil in Iran.
William Knox Darcy made an agreement with the Shah of Iran.
Darcy's team would search for oil.
If they found it, Darcy would gain exclusive rights to look for oil in Iran.
In return, the Shah stood to gain financially.
A geologist named George Bernard Reynolds led the search in the deserts of southwestern Iran.
For seven years, he and his drilling team worked in brutal conditions, with temperatures often rising above 50 degrees Celsius.
In May 1908, running out of money and with no oil in sight, Darcy sent a telegram to Reynolds, ordering him to stop the exploration.
But Reynolds kept digging.
And by the end of the month, he struck oil.
It was a so-called gusher spouting high into the sky.
And the reservoir wasn't just big, it was gigantic.
It was estimated to hold billions of barrels of oil.
It can't be overstated just how important this finding was.
The discovery of oil in Iran, and later other parts of the Middle East, would transform the global economy.
There were vast reserves, which meant vast amounts of money to be made.
It's worth noting that the change didn't take place overnight.
At the beginning of the 20th century, infrastructure in the Middle East was rudimentary, which limited the development of the oil industry.
But after the Second World War, with increasing global demand for oil, there was more investment in the region.
Once the oil had been extracted from reserves in the Middle East, it had to be transported
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