Word: driller
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...natural gas industry. In one corner was Clint Murchison, the flamboyant Texas oil tycoon (TIME, May 24, 1954) who bosses an empire of companies with assets of about $400 million. Against him was Francis Murray Patrick McMahon, 53, multimillionaire Canadian who began as a $4-a-day driller and rose to be a leading operator in Western Canada's spectacular oil boom. The big stake in the contest between them: a franchise to build a $350 million pipeline to carry Western gas 2,200 miles to the cities of Eastern Canada and the U.S. Midwest...
...driller that cuts the hardest metal-e.g., tungsten carbide-without touching it. Made by Cincinnati Milling Machine Co., the cutting edge is a stream of electrons a sort of manmade lightning. ¶A lathe with a mechanical brain, which computes the correct cutting speed for each job. Its makers, Monarch Machine Tool Co. of Sidney, Ohio, estimate that the brain alone can increase production 25% ¶A Cleveland Tapping Machine Co device that cuts threads on iron pipe fittings at the rate of 85 feet a minute, producing 1,480 fittings an hour, compared to the previous standard...
...chance-taking-ex-driller, McMahon climbed into his private plane (in which he flies 200,000 miles yearly), set out on a tour of U.S. gas capitals to persuade Fish and his associates to let Canada into the deal. Since pipeliners and oilmen continually drift around the North American continent in their private planes, the negotiations drifted, like some gigantic floating poker game, between Houston, Washington, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Finally the oilmen came to terms, and last week the private planes converged on Tulsa (it happened to be the most central spot that day) to sign...
...west Texas where we come from," said one calloused driller, "there's no water around. We operate dry as horned toads. They bring us down to Louisiana, and there's the ocean! We'll lick the s.o.b." No one who knows the oilmen doubts that they will...
...loaded onto barges and moved separately. The DeLong-McDermott barge comes completely equipped-even with its own caissons. They are dropped to the ocean floor through holes in the hull, then jacks lift the hull above the water, making a solid platform for drilling. When the driller wants to move, he simply lowers the hull to the water and pulls up the caissons. DeLong figures that the whole operation should take no more than 24 hours...