The first person to come up with this idea was M.K. Hubbert in the 1950s and 1960s, who said that a graph of oil production looks like a curve (which we now call Hubbert's Curve). Hubbert drew a graph in 1956 that predicted that the United States would reach its peak oil in the early 1970s. The United States did indeed reach its peak oil in the early 1970s. 