| Eighty-one
years ago this spring, Walter W. Trout sat down with lunch with Ross
Sterling, the president of Humble Oil and Refining Company and a future
Texas governor.
From that luncheon came the impetus for the invention
of the counterbalanced pumping unit -- the most visual piece of machinery in today's
oilfields.
With the decline of the sawmill business in the l920s, Trout
had traveled all over the oilfields seeking business for his company, Lufkin
Foundry and Machine Company. He constantly heard complaints about the way
oil was extracted from the earth.
With oil discoveries at Spindletop
in 1901, Saratoga in 1902, Sour Lake in 1903, and Humble in 1905, oil had become
a major industry in Texas. But the standard rig using a walking beam and sucker
rods, had not changed since oil was discovered in the 1800s.
During their
conversations, Sterling described to Trout an experiment his company's engineers
were conducting in an Orange
oilfield. He challenged Trout to build a worm-geared apparatus for pumping oil.
As a result, Trout's company built the first gear-enclosed oilfield pumping
unit and installed it on a Humble well at Goose Creek, now known as Baytown.
But the units did not stand up as well as Trout wanted. They were often too small
to handle large amounts of water, resulting in failed gears and cracked shafts.
But Trout didn't give up. W. L. Todd of Standard Oil said he liked
the geared unit but would not purchase it until some type of counter-balancing
was developed.
During another lunch with Todd in mid-1925, Trout made
pencil sketches of his counter-balancing ideas. Using his sketches, the company's
shop crews experimented with rotating counter-balancing ideas. In August of 1925,
they came up with a unit Trout liked. It was installed in Humble's Hull, Texas,
field, where it worked to everyone¹s satisfaction.
Trout later wrote:
"The well was perfectly balanced, but even with this result, it was such
a funny looking, odd thing that it was subject to ridicule and criticism, and
it took a long time, nearly a year, before we could convince many the idea was
a good one."
The design patented by Trout in 1926 led to decades
of dominance by Lufkin in the manufacture of the unique pumping unit, now the
standard throughout the world. |
