Teapot Dome scandal Teapot Dome scandal The Teapot Dome scandal was a bribery scandal involving the administration of United States President Warren G. Harding from 19211923. Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall had leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming, and two locations in California, to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding. The leases were the subject of a sensational investigation by Senator Thomas J. Walsh. Convicted of accepting bribes from the oil companies, Fall became the first presidential cabinet member to go to prison; no one was convicted of paying the bribes. Before the Watergate scandal,
History of the oil shale industry in the United States the norm. But in the late 1850s, those positions were reversed. By 1859, when some venture capitalists hired Edwin Drake to drill for oil in western Pennsylvania, the oil shale industry was well established, and it was the idea of drilling for crude oil that was unproven. Petroleum distillation had been going on in the US at a small scale since 1851, when Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania salt manufacturer Samuel Kier began taking the petroleum which was fouling his salt wells, and distilling it in a five-gallon still into lamp oil which he sold to coal miners. Kier never patented his distillation