oil, John D. Rockefeller didn’t behold its potential in a sudden revelatory flash but made an incremental transition from produce to oil. Clark and Rockefeller might have taken on consignment some of the first crude-oil shipments that reached Cleveland in early 1860, but it was the friendship between Maurice Clark and Samuel Andrews, an Englishman from Clark’s hometown in Wiltshire, that drew Rockefeller into the business. A hearty, rubicund man with a broad face and genial manner, Andrews was a self-taught chemist, a born tinkerer, and an enterprising mechanic.

