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The original oil well is probably the ultimate example of how the best ideas often sound completely insane. The basic story is that the guy pitched a bunch of VCs in New Haven in the 1850s and got laughed out of the room for saying that he thought the stuff inside whales was buried under a mountain in Pennsylvania.

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Combustible oil from the ground has been known about since antiquity.

Maybe they were (bio)chemists at heart? That stuff under a mountain is mineral oil: more useful than edible oils in many ways but it has to go under the frying pan, not in it.

It was not used much as food. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_oil only mentions margarine as an edible product. The rest are lubricants, lighting and soap.

From reading the article, it seems some of the whale products were waxy esters which I guess weren't digestible anyway.

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