John Henry Fairbank

John Henry Fairbank (1831 to 1914) was a surveyor, oilman and inventor in Lambton County, Ontario, who became the largest oil producer in Canada and held that position into the early 1900s. Hired in 1861 to survey land at Oil Springs, he leased a half-acre plot from James Miller Williams and dug a well he called Old Fairbank. After the price swings of 1862 and 1863 nearly ruined him, steady reinvestment of his profits built his holdings. In the mid 1860s he devised the jerker-line pumping system, in which wooden rods connected to a single power source pumped dozens of closely spaced, low-output wells at once, so that a steam engine was no longer needed at each well and hundreds of small wells became worth working. The method spread to oil fields in Central Europe, Indonesia, Mexico, the Middle East and South America. He also led producer groups against the growing power of refiners, ran a refinery in Petrolia and sat in the House of Commons of Canada from 1882 to 1887. Fairbank Oil, which he established in 1861, is described as the oldest continually operating petroleum company, and he entered the Canadian Petroleum Hall of Fame in 1997.