Drilling advances
Section: Columns
Adaptation. Recently, while watching a documentary on agriculture, I was struck by the similarities between farming equipment used in the mid- to late-19th century and early drilling equipment. In the film, an old thresher powered by a steam engine was separating grain from husk. The engine was connected by a wide fabric band to a large wooden wheel with a crank arm that converted rotary motion into a linear rocking arm. I remembered seeing a similar machine somewhere in an old photograph. Sure enough, a quick check of an old water-well, cable-tool rig, similar to the ones my grandfather used in the early 1900s, confirmed that the power-conversion system was almost identical to that of the thresher.
I then went back to a photo album, which I had assembled during high school, of antique pumping equipment in the Texas Panhandle. Again, an ancient steam engine was connected to a large wooden band wheel by a fabric belt. The band wheel had a crank that was connected by a stiff arm to a horizontal wooden beam that pivoted at its center. The other end of this "walking beam" connected to wooden sucker rods in the well. As the band wheel turned, the walking beam rocked up and down, providing reciprocating vertical motion to pump the shallow oil well. This system was, of course, the basis for the design of later steel pumping units (nodding donkeys) seen in oilfields around the world.
Clearly, this was an adaptation of another industry's technology to oilfield operations.
Thinking of pumping, I began to look into the history of rod-pumping systems. Sure enough, wooden sucker rods and downhole pumps with traveling valves came directly from windmills. The Dutch deserve credit for this invention; their windmills have b ...