A Sixth Sense

The Life and Science of Henri-Georges Doll: Oilfield Pioneer and Inventor

Michael Oristaglio, Alexander Dorozynski

• Publisher: Abrams Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781590201749
• eBook ISBN:
  9781683359050
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The true story of the French engineer and inventor who developed a mine detector for the US Army during WWII—and then went on to transform the oil industry.
 
In March 1940, with Europe at war, French army lieutenant Henri-Georges Doll came to the U.S. embassy in Paris to give a deposition. Doll was an artillery commander, a graduate of France's  grandes écoles of science, engineering, and service. He had been mobilized to the front at the start of the war, then quickly recalled to Paris to work on a secret device for detecting the deadly land mines being planted by the German army on a vast new scale. But Doll's deposition that day had nothing to do with the war. He had come to testify in a patent lawsuit pending in Houston, Texas.
 
The case was Schlumberger Well Surveying Corporation v. Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company: it marked one of the first great industrial battles for control of the technology of oil and gas exploration. When the German army marched into Paris three months later, Doll escaped to America, where he developed his new mine detector for the U.S. army, then settled in a small Connecticut town to become one of the most prolific inventors of the twentieth century. His sixth sense for applied science would help create the modern technology of seeing underground using electrical signals and sound waves—technology that would enable the explosive growth of oil production, and of Schlumberger, after the war. This biography tells his remarkable story.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction – An Average polytechnicien
• Chapter 2 Why Measure the Earth’s Resistivity?
• Chapter 3 The Age of Oil
• Chapter 4 From Core to Log
• Chapter 5 U.S.A. – No Oil for the “Frogs”
• Chapter 6 Between Two Wars
• Chapter 7 A Battery at Seminole
• Chapter 8 In the Soviet Union
• Chapter 9 Back in the U.S.A.
• Chapter 10 Dangerous Ground
• Chapter 11 Paris in Texas
• Chapter 12 Under Occupation
• Chapter 13 Losing a Battle
• Chapter 14 Mine Detectors
• Chapter 15 From War to Peace
• Chapter 16 Paris, Houston, New York, or Ridgefield?
• Chapter 17 Head Hunter
• Chapter 18 The Full Suit
• Chapter 19 From the Earth to the Moon
• Chapter 20 Schlumberger without the Schlumbergers
• Chapter 21 Epilogs
• Chapter 22 On Wall Street
• Chapter 23 Patrons of the Arts
• Chapter 24 Blood, After Oil
• Epilogue
• Note on Sources
• References
• Index of Searchable Terms