It provided the geological key to Alberta's most prolific conventional oil reserves and resulted in a boom in petroleum exploration and development across Western Canada.

The discovery transformed the Alberta economy; oil and gas supplanted farming as the primary industry and resulted in the province becoming one of the richest in the country.

Nationally, the discovery allowed Canada to become self-sufficient within a decade[citation needed] and ultimately a major exporter of oil.

Imperial Oil had spent millions of dollars drilling 133 dry holes in the previous years as only minor discoveries were made.

Calgary grew into a major financial centre and within two decades had the highest number of millionaires in Canada, per capita.

A farming community with fewer than 900 residents in 1947, Leduc grew to become Alberta's 13th largest city, while several towns, including Devon and Swan Hills, were founded to support workers in the oil and gas industry.

[1] Pioneer settlers to southern Alberta in the late 19th century noticed that an oily film occasionally covered pools of water, and that the air had unusual odours at times.

[2] In 1911, Ontario-born settler William Herron identified the nature of the odours from his time working in oil fields in Pennsylvania.

He convinced Calgary businessman Archibald Dingman and Member of Parliament R. B. Bennett to visit the site near Turner Valley.

The trio gathered four other investors, formed the Calgary Petroleum Products Company, Ltd. and began developing the region in search of oil.

[8] The first major crude oil discovery at Turner Valley was made in 1936 at a depth of 2,080 metres (6,820 ft), the deepest well in Alberta at the time.

[9] In the 30 years following the initial discovery of 1914, oil companies spent over $150 million on exploration and development but found no major reserves of note.

[12] By the mid-1940s, the company neared the decision of abandoning the search for oil in the province in favour of focusing on the production of synthetic gasoline out of natural gas.

[13] While the majority of the company's efforts drilled down only into Cretaceous levels where the Turner Valley strike was discovered, some of Imperial's geologists believed that greater reserves could be found deeper below the earth's surface.

Imperial's chief geologist, Ted Link, was among those who believed oil could be found at a much greater depth and had already met with success drilling at Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories.

The majority of the team favoured a triangular area that stretched between Calgary and Edmonton in central Alberta, up to Grande Prairie in the northwest.

[15] Imperial acquired rights to over 810 km2 (200,000 acres) of land southwest of Edmonton by the end of spring and began surveying the area for the best place to begin drilling.

This decision proved fortuitous, as a later effort by Imperial to drill at Pigeon Lake resulted in another dry hole.

[18] Imperial brought Vern Hunter, nicknamed "Dry Hole" as a result of his numerous past failures, to lead the drilling team.

It was a small find, and close to the limits of Paleozoic rocks, where conventional wisdom of the time held that oil was unlikely to be found.

[22] Shortly before 4 p.m., the crew finally cleared the wellhead and the 500 people who remained despite the bitter cold bore witness as Leduc No.

[23] The discovery at Leduc was actually a stroke of good fortune because geologists had chosen the location on the basis of theories that were later shown to be incorrect.

[24] The search for large oil reservoirs in Alberta had been ongoing for decades because the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin that lies beneath the majority of the Canadian Prairies was known to be prime ground for the formation of petroleum and natural gas, and it was unlikely that such a prime setting would have produced only the two oil fields that were known to exist in 1946.

[12] Within weeks, more than a dozen companies were drilling throughout the region, and by the end of 1947 there were 31 operational wells in the area, 24 of them owned by Imperial Oil.

3 well aided provincial growth as the derrick collapse and resulting inferno made international headlines and alerted the world to Alberta's oil strikes.

That industrial region has grown organically since the late 1940s, when Imperial Oil brought a tin-pot World War II refinery down from Whitehorse to process crude from Leduc and the other new fields.

Together they operate refineries and petrochemical plants, an upgrader, pipelines, service companies and numerous other interdependent businesses.

Many oil companies had placed their offices in the southern city following the Turner Valley discovery and made no effort to relocate even as drilling and exploration moved north.

[48] Today it is possible to imagine Calgary - which has the planet's greatest concentration of energy-related knowledge in its downtown core - becoming a serious rival to Houston as the energy capital of the world.

The Leduc #1 Energy Discovery Centre opened in 1997 and features exhibits about Canada's oil industry, including artifacts, photos and oilfield equipment.