Degolyer, Everette Lee

(b. Greensburg, Kansas, 9 October 1886; d. Dallas, Texas, 14 Decem ber 1956)

geophysics.

DeGolyer was the eldest child of John William and Narcissa Kagy Huddle DeGolyer, who had homesteaded in Kansas shortly before the boy’s birth Always interested in mining prospects, the senior DeGolyer moved his family to the lead and zinc center of Joplin, Missouri, and then to Oklahoma during the 1901 land opening. The boy finished high school at the University of Oklahoma preparatory school before entering the University of Oklahoma in the mining engineering course, where he was directed by Charles N. Gould and E. G. Woodruff. During the summer he worked for the U.S. Geological Survey, first as a cook but subsequently as a geologist. In the field in 1907 he impressed C. Willard Hayes, chief geologist of the Survey, who hired DeGolyer two years later to head the exploration staff of the Mexican oil company El Águila. DeGolyer’s acquaintance with Sir Weetman Pearson (later Lord Cowdray) from his work in Mexico in 1910 later led to financial backing for DeGolyer’s early oil companies, Amerada Petroleum Corporation and Rycade Oil Company.

Already holding a high reputation in oil discovery, DeGolyer resumed his interrupted college career at the University of Oklahoma, receiving the B.A. in 1911, and then returned to Mexico. From 1914 he was an independent oil consultant, and he founded and headed an interlocking series of oil exploration and research companies. His ability and unquestioned integrity led to his frequent employment by his own and other governments as adviser on development of oil fields.

DeGolyer received seven honorary doctorates and the Anthony F. Lucas (1941) and John Fritz (1942) medals of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Sigma Xi, and Phi Beta Kappa and a charter member of the Society of Economic Geologists and of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, which awarded him the Sidney Powers Memorial Award in 1950.

DeGolyer made his greatest contributions in the application of physical principles to solution of geological problems. He advocated and developed the theory, earlier suggested by European geologists, that salt domes form by the plastic flow of salt upward from deeply buried beds under the pressure of overlying rocks (1918). He then set out to locate salt domes by geophysical methods. Without question, DeGolyer’s development and use of these tools gave the search for petroleum its greatest impetus of the twentieth century. He began with the torsion balance, and in 1924 he found the first salt dome by this method. A subsidiary of Amerada, Geophysical Research Corporation, was set up by DeGolyer to perfect and apply the refraction and reflection seismographs to finding oil fields. In 1927–1928 the company found eleven new salt domes by refraction surveys, but it was the discovery of the Edwards oil field in Oklahoma in 1930 by reflection survey that ushered in the modern era of oil exploration.

A knowledgeable collector of books, DeGolyer assembled one of the world’s best libraries for the history of science, especially geology. He presented this library to the University of Oklahoma.

DeGolyer took his own life, after having been ill with aplastic anemia for seven years.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Many of DeGolyer’s early papers were on the Mexican petroleum industry. As his field enlarged, later papers summarized world petroleum production and methods. His analysis of salt-dome structure was presented in “The Theory of Volcanic Origin of Salt Domes,” in Bulletin of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, 137 (1918), 987–1000. The first two sources cited below list DeGolyer’s approximately seventy geological writings, and Denison’s memorial contains a complete bibliography that indicates DeGolyer’s broad range of interests.

II. Secondary Literature. Wallace E. Pratt’s “Memorial to Everette Lee DeGolyer,” in Proceedings of the Geological Society of America for 1957 (1958). 95–103, effectively summarizes the life and career of this energetic man. Further comments and indications of DeGolyer’s wide interests are in Carl C. Branson’s memorial in Oklahoma Geology Notes, 17 , no. 2 (1957), 11–21. A. Rodger Denison, in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 33 (1959), 65–86, describes DeGolyer’s personality.

Elizabeth Noble Shor