Oil, from farm to pharmaceutical, diesel truck to dinner plate, pipeline to plastic product, it is simply impossible to think of an area of our modern day lives that is not affected by the petrol chemical industry.

The story of oil is the story of the modern world and whilst parts of this story are well known, there is another side to which is more obscure, for example the quest of oil and the outbreak of WWI, the petrol chemical interests behind modern medicine and the big oil money behind the green revolution but this story properly told begins somewhere quite unexpected.

Not in Pennsylvania with the first commercial drilling operation and the first oil boom but rather in the rural backwoods of early 19th century New York state, and it doesn’t start out with crude oil or its derivatives either, instead a different product all together, Snake Oil.

This is the story of those who helped shape the world of oil, and how the oil-igarchy they created is on the verge of monopolizing life itself.