主题：石油为什么叫做石油？ -- 倥偬飞人

今天看到这篇玩意，才知道石油可能是这么叫出来的：美国当年的移民鸡二先生挖盐挖出了副产品，起了个名字叫Rock Oil，那时候没有汽车啥的，所以刚开始是当药卖的，万灵丹牌石油,鸡二先生就此成为美国石油工业之父！，这什么什么之父，来得也太容易了点！

为了扇起物以稀为贵的购买冲动，鸡二还成为最早提出石油危机的人。。。

Colonel Edwin Drake is popularly credited as founding the American petroleum industry. But this is not the case.

It's true that Drake drill the first oil well near Titusville, PA back in 1859. But it was Samuel Kier, inventor and businessman, who is really the grandfather of the American oil industry.

Kier -- a Scotch-Irish immigrant -- owned several salt wells around Livermore and nearby Saltsburg, PA. Kier also held interests in several coal mines, a brickyard, and a pottery factory but it was his salt business that really put food on the table.

In the early 1800s, Kier's salt business was booming. But by the 1840s, after years of mining, a crisis was looming as Kier's salt wells were becoming fouled with petroleum.

At first, Kier simply dumped the then useless oil into a nearby Canal. But after an oil slick caught fire, he was forced to stop. He then decided to look for some way to profit from this otherwise worthless byproduct.

With no formal training in science or chemistry, he began experimenting with several distillates of the crude oil. And in 1848 Kier developed a substance called Rock Oil (a "snake oil" type tonic whose key ingredient was the petroleum from his salt wells) and began selling the liquid as a ‘cure for everything' making him the first person to market petroleum.

Now the really interesting part to this story is this... In an 1855 advertisement for the Rock Oil, Kier prophetically urged customers to buy soon before "this wonderful product is depleted from Nature's laboratory."

Unbeknownst to Kier, these words would be echoed throughout history seemingly as the first hydrocarbon depletion warning.