Beginning with early uses of naturally seeping oil, the film explains how growing demand for lighting and lubricants encouraged people to seek larger supplies. A staged account recreates Edwin L. Drake and “Uncle Billy” Smith drilling a successful well at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, followed by an oil boom and the development of storage, pipelines, and refineries. Gasoline changes from a discarded refinery product into a valuable fuel as automobiles and internal-combustion engines become widespread.
Diagrams, demonstrations, and industrial scenes explain how oil was thought to form and collect underground and how geologists and geophysicists search for deposits with soil tests, gravity and magnetic measurements, and seismic surveys. Workers operate cable-tool and rotary drills, examine rock samples, line wells with casing, control pressure, and use pumps, gas, or water to recover oil on land and at sea. Refinery sequences show distillation and catalytic cracking separating and altering crude oil to produce fuels, lubricants, chemicals, plastics, detergents, and synthetic rubber.
The final section follows petroleum through pipelines, tankers, railroad cars, trucks, and service stations, then surveys its use in transportation, farming, manufacturing, roads, and the armed forces. Throughout, the film treats technological development and industrial expansion as sources of greater mobility, productivity, employment, and national prosperity. The closing message praises American enterprise and scientific knowledge and predicts that efficient use of petroleum will continue to improve life.
