Since 1872, the area in and around Baku has been dominated by the oil industry, as evident by the countless oil pumps and drilling rigs that crowd the landscape. This is the ill where wells were drilled with hand tools. The crude was extracted from the well manually, by workers using buckets, poored in a small canal digged along the slope and collected downhill into storage pits. The crude produced from houndreds of very shallow wells hand-digged uphill, was collected into these pits. The first oil well was drilled in Bibi-Heybat suburb of Baku in 1846. But the large-scale oil development started in 1872, when the Russian imperial authorities auctioned the parcels of oil-rich land around Baku to private investors. Within a short period of time Swiss, British, French, Belgian, German, Swedish and American investors appeared in Baku, among them were the firms of the Nobel brothers and Rothschilds, and industrial oil belt, better known as Black City, was established near Baku. By the beginning of the 20th century almost half of the oil reserves in the world had been extracted in Baku. This is the way the Nobel brothers and the young Rotschild started to later become billionaires  (photos: Historical Well (1880 ca) Wooden Cased) From the storage pits the crude was put into barrels and transported to the port by donkeys. Russian ships were waiting to load the precious material.