text: The first modern oil-drilling in the United States began in West Virginia and Pennsylvania in the 1850s. Edwin Drake's 1859 well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, typically considered the first true modern oil well, touched off a major boom.  In the first quarter of the 20th century, the United States overtook Russia as the world's largest oil producer. By the 1920s, oil fields had been established in many countries including Canada, Poland, Sweden, Ukraine, the United States, Peru and Venezuela.
  The first successful oil tanker, the Zoroaster, was built in 1878 in Sweden, designed by Ludvig Nobel. It operated from Baku to Astrakhan. A number of new tanker designs developed in the 1880s.
  In the early 1930s the Texas Company developed the first mobile steel barges for drilling in the brackish coastal areas of the Gulf of Mexico. In 1937 Pure Oil Company (now part of Chevron Corporation) and its partner Superior Oil Company (now part of ExxonMobil Corporation) used a fixed platform to develop a field in  of water, one mile (1.6 km) offshore of Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. In early 1947 Superior Oil erected a drilling/production oil-platform in  of water some 18 miles off Vermilion Parish, Louisiana. Kerr-McGee Oil Industries, as operator for partners Phillips Petroleum (ConocoPhillips) and Stanolind Oil & Gas (BP), completed its historic Ship Shoal Block 32 well in November 1947, months before Superior actually drilled a discovery from their Vermilion platform farther offshore. In any case, that made Kerr-McGee's Gulf of Mexico well, Kermac No. 16, the first oil discovery drilled out of sight of land. Forty-four Gulf of Mexico exploratory wells discovered 11 oil and natural gas fields by the end of 1949.