Roughnecks, Drillers, and Tool Pushers: Thirty-Three Years in the Oil Fields by Gerald Lynch

Abstract

698 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ture, the appropriation of the state’s land-grant college, the begin­ nings of industrial research, and the blossoming of science-based technology. Heitmann also recognizes as a technological imperative of sugar production the origin of the discipline of chemical engineering and especially the formulation of the practice of unit operations. Indeed, he argues that competition from abroad led in Louisiana to the study of the everyday problems associated with sugar manufacture, which produced a new hybrid knowledge combining chemistry and mechanical engineering. This inevitably culminated in scientific investigations into the parameters of extraction, evaporation, crystal­ lization, and the like. These conclusions are challenging, but the book too often is less an analysis of the past than a conscious attempt to touch virtually every theme of the present. The work of recent historians more than informs the book; Heitmann is enslaved by it. The effort to employ or at least comment on seemingly every au courant historical convention, including modernization, professionalism, organizationalism, the for­ mation and persistence of class cleavages, and of course the influence of science done in Europe on science done in America, reduces the study from an examination of texts and events to a series of brief, not always related—or germane—historiographically based essays. While the lack of a clear analytical line certainly detracts significantly from it, The Modernization of the Louisiana Sugar Industry does have substantial merit. Heitmann has consulted numerous sources and gathered much material not commonly known. The result is a work with many virtues, but those virtues are informational rather than explanatory. Alan I Marcus Dr. Marcus is professor of history and director of the center for historical studies of technology and science at Iowa State University. He is the author of Agricultural Science and the Quest for Legitimacy: Farmers, Agricultural Colleges, and Experiment Stations, 1870-1890 and, with Howard P. Segal, Technology in America: A Brief History (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989). Roughnecks, Drillers, and Tool Pushers: Thirty-Three Years in the Oil Fields. By Gerald Lynch. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. Pp. xiv + 262; illustrations, glossary, index. $16.95. When he “came into the oil patch” (p. 4) in 1925, Gerald Lynch was an intelligent, strong, and personable young man eager to become a “roughneck” among the nomadic bands of “oil field trash” (p. 2) that roamed through east Texas. He was easy to like and easy to respect for his energy and his quickness in understanding machinery and in analyzing the problems developing in the deep holes far below the TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 699 derrick platforms. At the age of twenty-four he was a highly skilled driller. He was soon a “tool pusher,” in charge of several crews hired to drill wells across Texas and New Mexico. In later years he became a “blowout specialist” (p. 247), a drilling consultant, an inventor, an area manager. He is today apparently still a man blessed with good health and humor. And although he is a modest enough man, his story makes it seem unlikely that anyone else today knows as much as he does about the practical operations of oil drilling in the American Southwest during the last half-century. It is even more unlikely that anyone else will ever write about oil-patch life with such lively wit, enthusiasm, and memory for vital aggregates of social and technolog­ ical detail. Lynch began his mastery by working with derricks made of wood and nailed together at the 108-foot level with an ax. In the 1920s, oil-patch tradition was a simple combination of hit-or-miss, guessor -miss farmhand skills and ignorance. The steam-powered equip­ ment was often manhandled, jerry-built, and jury-rigged, but seldom standardized; the operators were distinguished by their seat-ofthe -pants intuition and their redneck contempt for office workers, engineers, and geologists. Among Lynch’s many impressive qualities was his ability to work through this tradition, to learn in fact a great deal about oil-patch geology, and to astonish held engineers with the elegance of his several innovations. He quite naturally became proud of his achievements and of his reputation among the fraternity of...