LUCICH-LUCAS, ANTHONY Discovered Oil-Engineer

Another Croatian immigrant who helped revolutionize American industry was Captain Anthony Lucas. He was born on September 9, 1855, in Split, Croatia, the son of a sea captain, Franjo Lucic from the island of Hvar. Anthony completed gymnasium studies in Trieste, where his father served in the Austrian navy, then attended the same Polytechnic Institute in Graz which his countryman Tesla later attended. After graduating from the Institute in 1875, he enlisted as midshipman in the Austrian navy, where he was soon promoted to the rank of second lieutenant. However, he disliked the rigor of the service; in 1879 after an unpleasant incident he obtained a six months' leave to accept an invitation from his uncle in America, his father's brother, then living in Saginaw, Michigan. Upon his arrival here the young man found that his uncle had adopted the name of Lucas, to escape the difficulty that Americans had in spelling and pronouncing Lucic; Anthony then adopted the same name. After an extension of his leave, he decided to remain in this country. On May 9, 1885, he became an American citizen, receiving his citizenship papers at the Corporation Court at Norfolk, Virginia.

Lucas married Caroline Fitzgerald in 1887. The young couple spent a year of their honeymoon in Dalmatia and Trieste, then established their home in Washington, D.C., where Lucas worked as a mining engineer and geologist. By 1893 he was busy in Louisiana and Texas, where he stayed for three years. His dream was to find petroleum in a region where none had yet been found. Oil was first discovered in Pennsylvania, where a commercial well was drilled at Titusville in 1859. But to prospect for oil in Texas, as Lucas did, seemed to many a crazy idea. Nevertheless, he insisted on drilling in Beaumont, Texas at a place called Spindletop, where three companies already had failed. Lacking the necessary capital he approached the Standard OU Company for financial support, only to be told by their experts that he did not have the slightest chance of finding oil at Spindletop. Despite all, such discouragements, this stubborn prospector proceeded to drill.

Then suddenly on January 10, 1901, after drilling 1,020 feet deep, Lucas and his crew struck oil. It ran wild, gushing some 200 feet and drenching the ground with an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 barrels. The well ran wild for days before Lucas could cap it. The whole country was amazed. Fifty thousand people came to see the gushing of oil at Spindletop. The Lucas well was "heard around the world.

This was a great day in the industrial era of America. Lucas, however, did not develop the Spindletop. He sold all his interests to the Mellon group for $400,000. Lucas, for his part, did not stop with this first discovery. In Mexico, where he worked for the next three years, he found two other oil fields. In 1905 he returned to Washington, where he opened an office as consulting engineer. In this capacity, too, he travelled around the world. He died at the age of sixty-six on September 2, 1921, in Washington. The inscription on his tombstone at the Rock Creek Cemetery states that he was born in Spalato, Dalmatia, and that he was of "Illyrian [Croatian] parentage." To supplement all other evidence and his own statements, his tombstone plainly records his place of birth and his ancestry; yet surprisingly Who Was Who in America erroneously stated that Lucas was born in Trieste and that he was of Italian origin.26

On October 9, 1941, during the convention of the Texas Mid Continent Oil and Gas Association at Beaumont, Texas, a fifty foot granite monument honoring Lucas was unveiled at Spindletop. The inscription on the front reads, along with other tributes to Lucas. Petroleum has revolutionized industry and transportation; it has created untold wealth, built cities, furnished employment for hundreds of thousands, and contributed billions of dollars in taxes to support institutions of government. In a brief span of years, it has altered man's way of life throughout the world.

The memory of Captain Lucas has been honored in other ways too. The American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering, in order to recognize the "distinguished achievement and practice of finding and producing petroleum," established in 1936 the "Anthony F. Lucas Medal" as an award to all outstanding persons whose achievements contribute to the development of oil.

Prpic, George