In 1694 the British Crown issued Patent Number 330 to Martin Eele and his colleagues who reported to have found a way to extract and make great quantities of pitch, tar and oil out of a "sort of stone'*. This is the first verified report of oil products derived from oil shale. In the March 1874 issue of Scientific American, there was a news item that during the construction of a railroad in the Green River region, workmen piled together a few pieces of excavated rock as protection from a dinner fire and soon observed the stone itself ignited. This marked the first discovery of oil shale in North America, the tri-state area of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, which has one of the most abundant single deposits of organic-rich shale. By the 1920's, the development of oil shale was considerable, especially in the United States. Actually, a journal was published entitled The Shale Review to establish communication between different areas of oil-shale technology. In the interim years, there were ups and downs for the actual development of oil shale for practical uses. Although a progress was made in several locations of the world in commercial utilization of oil shales, a full development of this industry was not achieved.