Samuel M.Kier was originally a salt manufacturer; more canny than his competitors, he sold the oil which came up with his water as a patent medicine.

In order to give a mysterious virtue to this remedy, Kier printed on his labels the information that it had been "pumped up with salt water about four hundred feet below the earth's surface." His labels also contained the convincing picture of an artesian well--a rough woodcut which really laid the foundation of the Standard Oil Company.
In the late fifties Mr.George H.Bissell had become interested in rock oil, not as an embrocation and as a cure for most human ills, but as a light-giving material.

A professor at Dartmouth had performed certain experiments with this substance which had sunk deeply into Bissell's imagination.

So convinced was this young man that he could introduce petroleum commercially that he leased certain fields in western Pennsylvania and sent a specimen of the oil to Benjamin Silliman, Jr., Professor of Chemistry at Yale.

Professor Silliman gave the product a more complete analysis than it had ever previously received and submitted a report which is still the great classic in the scientific literature of petroleum.