Everette DeGolyer

Everette Lee DeGolyer was an American petroleum geologist and geophysicist, born October 9, 1886 in Greensburg, Kansas and died December 14, 1956 in Dallas, Texas, credited as the father of American geophysics for bringing systematic scientific exploration methods to the oil industry. After earning a geology degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1911, he worked as a field geologist for Mexican Eagle Oil, where he identified the Potrero del Llano No. 4 well, among the most productive oil wells in the history of Mexican petroleum production. He went on to pioneer the use of reflection seismology, sending sound waves into the earth and reading their echoes to map underground rock structures, a technique that raised the odds of drilling a productive well from roughly one in ten to about one in six. In 1930 he founded Geophysical Service Incorporated, the geophysical survey company that later became Texas Instruments, and in 1936 he founded both the petroleum consulting firm DeGolyer and MacNaughton and the drilling analysis company Core Laboratories. He received the Anthony F. Lucas Gold Medal in 1941 and the John Fritz Medal in 1942, and endowed the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University with his collection of rare scientific and historical books.