This book is of more than ordinary significance, for it tends to consolidate, in interesting and easily understandable terms, the history and definitions, not only of the now-standard oil barrel but also of the units that make it up and the legal pitfalls connected with it. It is a story full of oil-drilling lore—about odd-sized barrels in wagons for transporting the newly discovered petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859; about Benedict Hagan, who supplied many an empty whiskey barrel to the producers at Oil Run; about Nelly Bly, who is more redoubtable to the oil industry for having been the “mother of steel barrels” than for besting Phileas Fogg’s time in circling the globe; about the scientific struggle for accuracy in gauging oil.
When Plowman’s Folly was first issued in 1943, Edward H. Faulkner startled a lethargic public, long bemused by the apparently insoluble problem of soil depletion, by saying, simply, “The fact is that no one has ever advanced a scientific reason for plowing.” With that key sentence, he opened a new era.
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