On January 10, 1901, Anthony Lucas struck a gusher of black gold at a hill called Spindletop on the Texas gulf coast. When you imagine the cartoonish scene of an oilman rejoicing at the sight of oil shooting high into the air from his drilling rig, you’re seeing exactly what happened at Spindletop at the turn of the century.
It had always been thought there was some oil under the strange, salty surface of Spindletop Hill. Locals would come by to find greasy, thick bubbles on the ground which burned when you put a lit match to them. Anthony Lucas, a Croatia-born mechanical engineering, had theorized that the sulfurous makeup of the land of the gulf coast could be hiding not just a smattering of oil, but vast deposits of the stuff. In 1899 he leased some land, including Spindletop Hill, and began exploratory drilling. It was over a year of determined searching, and several financial backers, before Lucas would hit it big.
On the morning of January 10, after drilling to a largely unprecedented depth of twelve-hundred feet, the gusher erupted. Lucas’ drill bit cracked the case of an ancient oil deposit, so rich and full of the thick liquid that it shot upwards through the bore hole and out of the top of the rig and hundreds of feet into the air. It would gush for nine days before Lucas could bring it under control and begin harvesting the one hundred thousand barrels of oil it gave every day, and in the meantime it attracted over fifty thousand people to see this amazing natural force.
The Spindletop gusher had a marked effect on the town, the region, and the world. The town itself boomed with commerce when tens of thousands of prospectors came to find oil deposits of their own. By 1902, the population had risen to more than six times what it was when Lucas arrived, and nearly three hundred wells were in operation by over five hundred companies, all founded specifically for taking advantage of this opportunity. It was the true beginning of the American oil rush, and the sheer volume of oil discovered pushed the tide of technology towards embracing this seemingly endless supply of fuel. Lucas ultimately made little from the Spindletop gusher as he was a vast minority owner of his company, but he became known as the expert on oil prospecting and was kept very busy for the rest of his life.