Anthony Francis Lucas was born on September 9, 1855 in Split, Dalmatia, Austria (nowadays, Croatia). He was the son of a ship-builder and ship-owner, Captain Francis Stephen Luchich, and his wife, Giovanna Giovanizio, of Montenegrin descent. When Anthony was six years old his family removed to Trieste, Austria.
Lucas received his primary education in Trieste, Austria. At the age of twenty he graduated from the Polytechnic Institute, Gratz, and then entered the Naval Academy of Fiume and Pola from which he graduated in 1878.
In 1879 Lucas came to the United States to visit an uncle residing in Saginaw, Michigan, and became so much interested in the lumber industry that he resigned from the Austrian navy, followed his uncle's example and changed his name to Lucas, and applied for American citizenship. His final naturalization papers were granted May 9, 1885.
From 1879 to 1893 he engaged first in lumbering and then, as a consulting mechanical and mining engineer, with offices and residence in Washington, D. C. , in mining activities in the West. In 1893 he accepted a position as mining engineer for a salt-mining company at Petit Anse, Louisiana. During his three years' service with this organization he became much interested in the occasional mounds of low elevation occurring in the Gulf Coastal Plain areas of Louisiana and Texas, and in 1896 he began privately the serious study of these so-called domes. In the course of this work, which involved prospecting with a diamond drill, he located a number of great deposits of rock salt and also studied the seepages of petroleum and sulphur from other domes. He came to the conclusion that these elevated areas were geological structures per se, distinct from the surrounding sedimentary deposits with which the elevation was encircled, and that the areas showing seepages on the surface were in reality natural reservoirs of petroleum. On the basis of this theory, he selected an elevated area known as Big Hill, now Spindletop, near Beaumont, Texas, leased 220 of its 300 acres, and then sought financial aid to undertake drilling for oil. Because of his unusual theory, for which there was no proof in any of the oil fields then existing in the world, Lucas could secure the aid of only the J. M. Guffey Petroleum Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and that only by relinquishing the larger part of his interest in the undertaking.
Operations were begun on October 27, 1900, using a crude form of hydraulic rotary drill. After successfully overcoming discouraging difficulties with quicksand by devising a check valve (which he failed to patent) he struck oil at a depth of 1, 139 feet on January 10, 1901. Within twenty-four hours petroleum was gushing from the well at the rate of nearly a hundred thousand barrels a day--the largest oil well, by far, ever completed in the United States. The Lucas Gusher on Spindletop started a new era in the oil industry.
Anthony Francis continued with the J. M. Guffey Petroleum Company for about a year and then in 1902 undertook petroleum exploration in Mexico for the Mexican Eagle Oil Company, Limited. In 1905 he returned to Washington, D. C. , and resumed his consulting practice, which he continued until his death.
Lucas was widely known as the discoverer of the largest oil well in the United States. He was also considered to be the founder of modern petroleum reservoir engineering. The American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering, in order to recognize "'distinguished achievement and practice of finding and producing petroleum" established in 1936 the Anthony F. Lucas Medal.
Lucas was a member of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, the Franklin Institute, and the American Electrochemical Society, and of the Engineers' Club, New York, and the Cosmos Club, Washington.
On September 22, 1887, Lucas married Carolina Weed Fitzgerald, who with a son survived him.
