Finding Oil: The Nature of Petroleum Geology, 1859-1920

2. Collaborative Authority: Nineteenth-Century Foundations of Petroleum Geology

45 Petroleum geology emerged over the course of the nineteenth century as a contested practice in which different constituencies formulated knowledge by fashioning relationships to nature through their physical and intellectual work. Many histories of science relate a trajectory in which a loose assortment of elite practitioners commonly labeled gentlemen scientists began to formalize their activities early in the nineteenth century and to form professional associations; by century’s end they had fashioned an efficient and systematic body of knowledge private industry could comprehend and utilize.1 The science of petroleum geology was never so clear and stable as this narrative presupposes. A story line that relates how scientists gradually emerged to codify geological processes of oil accumulation dismisses the strong cultural component of laymen whose experiences in local environments informed the process of knowledge-making.2 Practical men prospected for oil and performed the vast majority of physical labor involved in drilling, which provided them with numerous opportunities to observe the color, odor, texture, and consistency of the oil-laced soil their efforts uncovered at well sites. Experiences in nature invested them with authority to deduce from their observations when to stop drilling, when to drill deeper, or where to drill next. Disputes over the meaning of this knowledge intensified when scientists began examining well samples in an effort to derive theories Collaborative Authority nineteenth-century foundations of petroleum geology 2 collaborative authority 46 that carried translocal and potentially universal explanatory power. Scientists who built upon these data to articulate geological theories acquired a new kind of authority by the 1880s through their capacity to generate knowledge that was codified, systematic, and universal but most importantly that explained how and where oil accumulated.3 Professional scientists acquired this authority in part from their intellectual efforts but also from their ability to capitalize on the knowledge practical oil men generated from working in nature. Geologists who acquired authority did not operate in unanimity or consensus but engaged in epistemic contests with one another, further underscoring the contested nature of relationships that all practitioners forged, professional and laymen alike, between the environment and the ideas and practices of finding oil. Knowledge about petroleum existed as theories in the minds of geologists as much as it took form in the physical labor and sensory experiences of practical men.4 Casting geologists as theoretical and laymen as practical overemphasizes differences between the two and obscures how both groups theorized and physically labored to find oil. Still, these categories, although overstated, help to convey that the locus of authority among oil prospectors shifted from those whose work practices were local, experiential, and tradition laden to professional geologists who strove to fashion universal and systematic ways of knowing the environment.5 This shift occurred neither naturally nor inevitably and involved much discussion, dispute, and disagreement among geologists. Like practical men, geologists fashioned relationships to nature in highly individualistic ways, and their experiences in nature shaped the geological theories they formulated. Diverse environments in which oil was situated shaped their perceptions and often exacerbated disagreements among them. Thus geologists contested the knowledge of oil accumulation among themselves as much as they disputed the ideas and methods of practical oil men. What all these contests for authority reveal and what this chapter explores is the idea that the science of petroleum geology was funda- collaborative authority 47 mentally a collaborative effort between different constituencies shaped by the environment’s surface and subsurface geological makeup. No single constituency or person won the turf battles fought over oil’s location because science, and petroleum geology in particular, grew as the result of a long and ongoing collaboration in which various practitioners participated even if not always harmoniously. Emphasizing how an array of geologists and practical men collectively shaped the field of petroleum geology reveals what one historian has called a “complex web of social and cognitive interactions” that bound a “network of colleagues, in collaboration or rivalry or both.”6 In the oil industry collaboration and rivalry took several forms. Some geologists recognized the difficulty of amassing and interpreting enormous amounts of data and collaborated more easily with each other to meet their employers’ demands. Others proved more intransigent, challenging the theories of their peers or taking from nonexperts knowledge that they considered crudely factual and that required a geologist’s purview to make sense. The best geologists struck a tenuous balance between a wide assortment of...