IT’S TODAY: We mark an unusual anniversary today, one which
helps to recognize Bradford’s place in the birth of the country’s
oil and gas industry.

It was May 11, 1880, when the U.S. Patent Office issued Patent
No. 117,419 to Solomon Robert Dresser of Bradford. With some
foresight on this same day, he had arranged for an ad to appear in
the Era telling oil producers that the “Dresser Cap Packer” was now
on sale at his 83 Main St. office.

Solomon Dresser had spent nearly a dozen years prior chasing the
“black gold” and, at 36 years of age, knew that the primitive art
of drilling was ripe for technological advancement.

And Solomon knew a successful inventor could make a fortune in
the latest “boomtown” in the center of the most prolific oil field
yet discovered in America, and moved his family to Bradford in
1878.

Recognizing a mechanical problem with present-day well packers,
Dresser created a unique clamping mechanism to hold the rubber
collar in place. It was a start and it provided a base from which
he would introduce another invention 12 years later – the Dresser
coupling.

Relying on his acquired knowledge of rubber compounds he
introduced his flexible, leakproof coupling, a breakthrough method
for joining plain-end pipe in the emerging natural gas
industry.

By 1918, more than two million Dresser couplings linked a
network of thousands of miles of natural gas pipelines across the
nation.

Today, Dresser Piping Specialties in Bradford is a subdivision
of Dresser, Inc., headquartered in Dallas, Texas, a worldwide
leader in the design, manufacture and marketing of highly
engineered equipment and services sold primarily to customers in
the flow control, measurement systems, and compression and power
systems segments of the energy industry.

GAS PRICES: Patricia Costello of Aberdeen, Wash., makes us feel
a little better about our high gasoline prices. “We pay $3.10 to
$3.50 a gallon here. I took a 400-mile trip across Washington over
the weekend … I live on the Pacific Coast so you can imagine what
the total for the round trip to the other side and back was.”

On a very unrelated note, she tells us actor Tom Cruise was in
Aberdeen on Wednesday and she managed to get his autograph. The
actor was at a mall across the street from her home and, she tells
us, “it looked like a Hollywood premier.”