The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

Many of the geophysical innovations were adapted from technology that had been drafted into use during World War I. One was the torsion balance, an instrument that measured changes in gravity from point to point on the surface, thus providing some sense of the subsurface structure. Developed by a Hungarian physicist before the war, it was used by the Germans during the First World War, in trying to get the Rumanian fields back into production. Another innovation was the magnetometer, which measured changes in the vertical components of the earth’s magnetic field, giving further hint of what lay beneath the surface. The seismograph also joined the arsenal of oil exploration, proving to be the most powerful new weapon of all. The seismograph had originally been developed in the mid-nineteenth century to record and analyze earthquakes. The Germans put it to work during the war to locate enemy artillery emplacements. That led directly to its use in the oil industry in Eastern Europe. What was called refraction seismology was introduced into the U.S. oil industry about 1923–24, initially by a German company. Dynamite charges were set off, and the resulting energy waves, refracted through underground structures, were picked up by listening ears—“geophones”—on the surface, which helped to identify underground salt domes, where oil might be found. The reflection seismograph, introduced about the same time and soon to supplant the refraction technique, recorded the waves that bounc...