Science: Prospector's Son

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Last week a tall, tanned geophysicist and petroleum engineer named Herbert Clark Hoover Jr. addressed the Institute of Radio Engineers in San Francisco. He told them how seismographic or "artificial earthquake" methods of prospecting for oil had improved in recent years. Technique at present is to bore a hole 500 ft. deep, drop a dynamite charge to the bottom. When the charge is exploded, vibrations resembling earthquake waves ripple out in all directions. Some travel straight down, and part of them are reflected back up with different intensities from layers of rock, sandstone, limestone, shale. Geophones on the surface pick up these reflected waves, and from the time intervals the prospecting engineers can tell how far down the different layers are beneath various points on the surface. If by this means they can plot something that looks like an oil dome, they indicate the probability of oil. It is then up to the driller to find out if oil is definitely there.

It was natural for Herbert Jr., a graduate of Stanford and Harvard Business School and since then a radio engineer, to get into seismographic oil prospecting, not only because his father has prospected off & on all his life (and still does), but because the sound technique leans heavily on radio principles. Herbert Jr., at 35, is a prospector in a big way, employing 200 men in five laboratories. He lives with his wife and three children in a secluded whitewashed brick house behind Pasadena, rides and plays a little tennis, but has little time for social doings and no time for country clubs. Most of the time he works. Unlike Jimmy Roosevelt, son of another U. S. President, who lives only 20 miles away, Herbert Hoover Jr., has no interest whatever in politics.