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William McGarvey was born in Huntingdon, Quebec, Canada and died in Vienna. The 1866 Canadian breakthrough discovery of oil deposits was also important to McGarvey. The young man first worked as a drilling intern and then opened his own extraction company. In 1881, he travelled to Europe. He opened the most innovative refinery of the time and the famous drilling machinery factory in Glinik Mariampolski. With time, he transformed his company into the Galician-Carpathian Oil Association. McGarvey held shares in numerous Galician companies, which opened successive wells. After 1905, he moved to Vienna and controlled his continuously growing oil empire from there.
He graduated from Higher Realschule in Kielce and from the Polish Military School in Genoa and Cuneo. He also studied economics at universities in Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Vienna. He was a member of the Polish National Government during the January Uprising. In 1868, he settled in Gorlice and took the job of head of the peasant bank. He founded Galicia’s first credit union and was elected president of the Union of Gainful and Economic Associations in Lviv. Biechoński ran the company together with Eufrozyna Dobrowolska. They managed 28 wells and employed 51 people. He wrote the book about the industry entitled: A Quick View of the Galician Oil Mining Industry.
