THE JOURNAL 
of the 
Society of 
Petroleum Geophysicists 
(Division of Geophysics, American Association of Petroleum Geologists) 
VoLtumME VI JULY, 1935 NUMBER I 
NOTES ON THE EARLY HISTORY OF APPLIED 
GEOPHYSICS IN THE PETROLEUM INDUSTRY 
E. DEGOLYER 
The writer first became interested in the possibility of using ap- 
plied geophysics as an aid to prospecting for petroleum deposits 
during the summer of 1914 as the result of a conversation in London 
with the late P. C. A. Stewart, regarding the difficulties of prospecting 
for new salt domes in the flat Gulf Coastal plain of Texas and Loui- 
siana and in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico. Stewart vaguely 
remembered that some success was said to have been had in deter- 
mining underground geology by gravity surveys in the great Hun- 
garian Plain. Inquiry was made and we were told that such was indeed 
the case, that the surveys had been made with a new instrument, the 
torsion balance, invented by Baron Roland von Eétvés and that 
the only existing balances were within the territory of the Central 
Powers. The Great War had just started. 
The torsion balance is essentially a development into a compara- 
tively robust field instrument of the more delicate and older Coulomb 
torsion balance which has been used in physical laboratories since 
the eighteenth century for investigating and demonstrating the laws 
of gravitational attraction. In 1888, the eminent Hungarian physicist, 
Baron Roland von Eétvés, Professor of Physics in the University of 
Budapest, demonstrated how this balance, which has since been 
known universally as the Eétvés torsion balance, could be used for 
more extensive studies of gravity variation than had hitherto been 
possible by the use of pendulum stations. The first primitive field 
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