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Raised on farms in New York and Vermont, Drake worked as a hotel and dry-goods clerk before becoming an agent for the Boston and Albany Railroad. In 1850 he became a conductor on the New York and New Haven Railroad, but a few years later he had to retire for health reasons. In 1857, while living in New Haven, Connecticut, Drake met stockholders of the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, which claimed a lease on land near Titusville, Pennsylvania, where oil had been gathered from ground-level seepages for medicinal uses. The company hoped to make money selling the oil for lighting, and to this end the stockholders sent Drake to Titusville to assess the viability of the enterprise. Letters of introduction to businessmen in the area referred to Drake as “Colonel,” and for the rest of his life he was known as Colonel Drake. After Drake returned to New Haven with a favourable report, the New Haven stockholders formed a new company, the Seneca Oil Company, sold some stock to Drake, and sent him back to develop the site.
source -https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elias-Howe

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Evans was apprenticed to a wheelwright at the age of 16. Observing the trick of a blacksmith’s boy who used the propellant force of steam in a gun, he began to investigate ways to harness steam for propulsion. Before he could successfully pursue this line of research, however, he became involved with a number of other industrial problems. Carding, or combing, fibres to prepare them for spinning was a laborious process constituting a bottleneck in the newly mechanized production of textiles. To speed this operation Evans invented a machine that cut and mounted 1,000 wire teeth per minute on leather, the teeth serving as an improved carding device.
source- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Oliver-Evans

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Robert Fulton, (born November 14, 1765, Lancaster county, Pennsylvania  died February 24, 1815, New York, New York), American inventor, engineer, and artist who brought steamboating from the experimental stage to commercial success.Fulton was the son of Irish immigrants. When their unproductive farm was lost by mortgage foreclosure in 1771, the family moved to Lancaster, where Fulton’s father died in 1774 (not 1786 as is generally written). Having learned to read and write at home, Fulton was sent at age eight to a Quaker school. Later he became an apprentice in a Philadelphia jewelry shop, where he specialized in the painting of miniature portraits on ivory for lockets and rings.
source- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Fulton-American-inventor

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Samuel Slater, (born June 9, 1768, Belper, Derbyshire, England—died April 21, 1835, Webster, Massachusetts, U.S.), English American businessman and founder of the American cotton-textile industry.As an apprentice in England to Jedediah Strutt (partner of Richard Arkwright), Slater gained a thorough knowledge of cotton manufacturing. He immigrated to the United States in 1789, attracted by the bounties offered there for workers skilled in the manufacturing of cotton. He was forced to keep his knowledge and skills a secret from authorities, however, because at the time emigration of textile workers and the export of drawings of textile machinery were forbidden by British law. With his detailed knowledge of textile machinery, financial backing from the Rhode Island firm of Almy and Brown, and the assistance of skilled artisans, he constructed versions of Arkwright’s spinning and carding machinery and established the first successful cotton mill in the United States.
source- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Slater

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Edwin Drake, in full Edwin Laurentine Drake, (born March 29, 1819, Greenville, New York, U.S.—died November 8, 1880, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania), driller of the first productive oil well in the United States.Raised on farms in New York and Vermont, Drake worked as a hotel and dry-goods clerk before becoming an agent for the Boston and Albany Railroad. In 1850 he became a conductor on the New York and New Haven Railroad, but a few years later he had to retire for health reasons. In 1857, while living in New Haven, Connecticut, Drake met stockholders of the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, which claimed a lease on land near Titusville, Pennsylvania, where oil had been gathered from ground-level seepages for medicinal uses. The company hoped to make money selling the oil for lighting, and to this end the stockholders sent Drake to Titusville to assess the viability of the enterprise.
source- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edwin-Laurentine-Drake