Present to your audience. 1  Invited audience members will follow you as you navigate and present. 2  People invited to a presentation do not need a Prezi account.
American settlers had little use for oil. In the 1840s, Americans began using kerosene to light lamps after the Canadian geologist Abraham Gesner discovered how to distill the fuel from oil or coal. It wasnât until 1859, however, when Edwin L. Drakesuccessfully used a steam engine to drill for oil near Titusville, Pennsylvania, that removing oil from beneath the earthâs surface became practical. This breakthrough started an oil boom that spread to Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and, later, Texas. Petroleum-reï¬ning industries arose in Cleveland and Pittsburgh as entrepreneurs rushed to transform the oil into kerosene. Gasoline, a byproduct of the reï¬ning process, originally was thrown away.
It is fitting that the first person to devise a working steam engine would be a man named Hero. Sixteen hundred years after the ancient Greek scientist first made mention of the untapped power of steam, the technology would become the hero and the engine that drove the Industrial Revolution.