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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.
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