August 27, 1859. Near Titusville, in Venango County, Pennsylvania.

Outside this town of 125 people, a modest, but as it turned out, visionary business idea led to the drilling of a shallow oil well. Its success spudded a global industry that would, in turn, transform the world.

Col. Edwin L. Drake (who was not really a colonel) was hired by New York investor George Bissell to drill a well. They worked with a local blacksmith known as Uncle Billy Smith in the effort to find an alternative supply to satisfy the burgeoning demand for kerosene in cities along the East Coast.

At Titusville, just as today, technological innovation drove the oil industry. Instead of digging into a natural oil seep by hand, as people had done for centuries, Drake and Smith came up with the revolutionary idea to use a steam-powered borer of sorts, similar to that used for drilling for salt. When gravel and water began to fill the hole, Drake addressed the problem by driving an iron pipe down to bedrock and drilling inside the pipe.

Final depth of the Drake well was 69.5 feet. It pumped about 20 barrels of oil per day, more production than from any other source at the time, according to a history compiled by the Drake Well Museum in Titusville.

By the end of 1860, some 75 wells were producing in the immediate area of Drake’s well. There were 15 small refineries to turn the crude into kerosene, according to The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, by Daniel Yergin.

In 1860, world oil production topped 500,000 barrels per year, an astounding number for that era. Today, production is about 84 million barrels per day.

The Drake well was far from the only noteworthy event in 1859. French engineers broke ground for the Suez Canal, and Oregon was admitted as the 33rd state in the Union. Darwin published On the Origin of Species. The Comstock Lode was discovered in Nevada and set off a silver-mining frenzy throughout the West. Federal troops captured abolitionist John Brown at a government arms facility in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, presaging the Civil War and years of strife.

But arguably, it was the flow of oil at the Drake well, beside a creek in northwestern Pennsylvania, that changed the world more than any other event. The ability to find and produce commercial quantities of oil has made fortunes, fueled dreams and helped to build up economies and living standards throughout the world. It enabled the spread of industrialization and urbanization in the U.S. after the Civil War, and later, throughout much of the world.

Oil was a factor in World War II, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in part because the U.S. had cut off oil exports to Japan in August 1941. And oil helped pave the road to peace, as the Allies relied on U.S. oil supplies to fuel their campaigns in the European and Pacific theaters.

Since then, U.S. troops have gone to war several times in the Middle East. No matter the other reasons given, maintaining security of crude supplies has been an underlying motivation for military intervention there.

In ways both good and bad, oil has affected how we live, where we live, what we buy, even the very air we breathe.

But are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the oil era? Today as never before, the world is questioning crude oil’s role in energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions. Analysts are speculating about the timing of peak oil—some believe it is already here—and energy giant ExxonMobil has forged an alliance with a biotech firm to fashion a biofuel from photosynthetic algae.

At press time, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was holding hearings on the way energy, military security and diplomacy intersect. Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar said, “Three vulnerabilities stand out as areas of concern for energy diplomacy. First, instability and conflict may disrupt energy flows and undermine needed investment. Second, governments may make supply and investment decisions based upon politics, not economics. And finally, terrorist activity may threaten major energy infrastructure.

“If we fail to address these vulnerabilities, the prospects for (global) economic recovery could be seriously imperiled.”

But this month, in “the valley that changed the world,” as WQED-TV in Pittsburgh puts it in a new documentary about the petroleum industry, time will stand still as people celebrate the 150th anniver­sary of Drake’s well, and the industry it sparked.