Word: layered
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...pillboxes were 70 yards apart and built into rock and were amazingly well camouflaged. They were of two sizes. The four-by-fours contained machine-gun nests, the ten-by-tens hid each a mortar. The roofs were of railroad ties and rails buried under a two-foot layer of broken stone. The approaches were sown with the German anti-personnel mines...
Ranney's well actually works on the same principle as a coal mine. In coal fields, miners dig a shaft down to the layer of coal, then work horizontally through the layer, cutting the coal away...
Conventional oil drilling is vertical: drill ers bore a narrow shaft down through the layer of sedimentary rock in which the oil is stored. From the small shaft surf ace they usually get only about 20% of the oil actually present...
Horizontal Man. Ranney reasoned: Why not drill horizontally for oil, as miners dig coal? He designed a"Ranney-well" for oil mining - a vertical, concrete-lined shaft, sunk to the oil level, and a circular chamber at the bottom from which drillers might bore horizontally into the surrounding layer of oil sandstone. By drilling 24 holes, each radiating...
from the chamber like wheel spokes, he thought he could expose about 3,000 times as much oil-bearing surface as a conventional well driven vertically through the 20-ft. oil-bearing layer-and presumably get 3,000 times as much...