Word: spindletop
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Dates: during 1933-1933
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...found this interest very annoying. Texaco has had a tradition of down right individualism ever since it was founded by John Warne ("Bet-a-Million") Gates & friends in 1902 - a longshot bet on a little $3,000,000 concern which had grown out of a wildcat gusher in the Spindletop pool. Ralph Holmes went to Texaco at its founding. Grandson of an oilman, he was raised in Olean, N. Y. near the Pennsylvania oil fields, quit school to go into refining. For Texaco he helped develop the famed Holmes-Manley gasoline cracking process, helped push its distribution into 51 foreign...
...Mellon and Frick. While all this was going on, one morning in 1901 a Jugoslav mining engineer punched a hole in a salt dome on the Texas plains and a huge fountain of oil such as man had never seen before spouted into the air. That well at Spindletop was to turn out more oil in the first three years than all the wells of Pennsylvania combined. It remade the oil business. Unable to cope with a financial find of such magnitude the Jugoslav and his backer called in Colonel Guffey of Pittsburgh. Guffey soon called in the Mellons. Andrew...