192
" Yet four more years would pass before rock oil began to flow in volume in Pennsylvania. Once the Silliman report established that petroleum had value as an illuminant, the problem remained how to extract enough from the Oil Creek site to make the venture profitable. In the meantime, the company went through several more reorganizations as the New Haven investors contrived to cut the New York men out of the deal. In 1858 a new entity, the Seneca Oil Company of New Haven, Connecticut, swallowed up the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company.44 Banker James Townsend and his fellow New Haven investors took control, brought in a new associate, a local man named Edwin L. Drake, and elected him president. It was Drake, improbably, who would find a way to release petroleum from its stone detention underground. "
― Richard Rhodes , Energy: A Human History