Halliburton Company's origin story is one of the most remarkable entrepreneurial journeys in American business history. Erle Palmer Halliburton was born on September 22, 1892, on a farm near Henning, Tennessee. After his father died when Erle was 14, he left home to work at various jobs, eventually joining the U.S. Navy in 1910. Honorably discharged in 1915, Halliburton found work with Almond A. Perkins of the Perkins Oil Well Cementing Company in the California oil fields. Halliburton's constant suggestions for improving Perkins's cementing process were unwelcome and eventually led to his being fired. Halliburton would later say that 'the two best things that ever happened to me were being hired, and fired, by the Perkins Oil Well Cementing Company.' In 1919, Halliburton and his wife Vida Tabor Halliburton moved to Burkburnett, Texas, in the Mid-Continent Region, where he introduced oil-well cementing to drillers with his new and improved method. The couple worked tirelessly with borrowed equipment and little or no operating cash. At one point, they had to pawn Vida's wedding rings to pay the hired help. To sustain the business, Vida hand-washed the cement sacks used in the cementing process so they could be resold to the cement companies. Halliburton's big break came when Skelly Oil Company hired him to control a wild well in the Hewitt-Wilson Field in south-central Oklahoma. This gave him a chance to prove his services. On May 7, 1920, he reorganized his enterprise as the Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company. In 1921, the company established headquarters in Duncan, Oklahoma. The next year, Halliburton patented a new 'jet-cement' mixer, which increased the speed and quality of the mixing process. By late 1922, seventeen Halliburton trucks were busy cementing wells in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas. The work was difficult—the vehicles frequently got stuck in mud as they moved across all sorts of terrain to reach well sites. 'We will get there, somehow,' became the company slogan. Employees and supervisors had to be hardy, grimy, tough-willed men. As late as 1959, every company official but one was said to have started with Halliburton as a truck driver. In 1924, when the company was incorporated in Delaware, seven major oil companies made significant investments in it. In 1926, Halliburton established a Canadian operation, and in 1940 it expanded into South America. In 1948, the stock was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1957, the company acquired Welex Jet Services of Fort Worth. Two years later, it bought Otis Engineering Corporation of Dallas. The significant acquisition of Brown & Root of Houston in 1962, for $36.7 million, gained for the company industrial and marine engineering and construction capabilities. Brown & Root had been involved in many notable projects, including construction of the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center (now the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center) near Houston, and had annual revenues of $5.5 billion at the time of acquisition. In 1960, the firm shortened its name to Halliburton Company, and in 1961 it moved its headquarters from Duncan, Oklahoma, to Dallas, Texas. During the 1980s, Halliburton acquired Geophysical Services from Texas Instruments and Geosource, another geophysical service company. It also started Halliburton Logging Services through a buyout of Gearhart Industries. The pivotal moment in Halliburton's modern history came in 1998, when the company merged with Dresser Industries in a $7.7 billion deal. The merger created Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), combining Halliburton's energy services with Dresser's engineering and equipment businesses. The combined entity became one of the largest oilfield services and engineering companies in the world. However, the diversification into government contracting and construction through KBR would later create strategic challenges. In 2007, Halliburton spun off KBR as an independent company, refocusing on core oilfield services. The separation allowed Halliburton to concentrate on its strengths in drilling, evaluation, completion, and production while KBR pursued government and infrastructure contracts. In 2014, Halliburton announced a proposed $34.6 billion acquisition of Baker Hughes, which would have created a $60 billion oilfield services giant and the industry's largest company by revenue. The deal, announced in November 2014, was intended to achieve $2 billion in annual cost synergies and create a more efficient competitor against SLB. However, the acquisition faced intense regulatory scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Justice and antitrust authorities in Europe, Asia, and Australia. In April 2016, the companies announced they had mutually agreed to terminate the merger due to regulatory opposition. Halliburton paid Baker Hughes a $3.5 billion breakup fee, one of the largest in corporate history, and incurred hundreds of millions in additional legal and advisory costs. The failed deal was a significant setback, though Halliburton's balance sheet and market position remained intact. In 2017, Jeffrey A. Miller was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer, succeeding Dave Lesar. Miller, who had joined Halliburton in 1997 and served in roles including Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President of Global Business Development, brought deep operational experience and a focus on capital discipline. In 2019, Miller added the Chairman of the Board title, consolidating leadership. Under Miller, Halliburton has pursued a strategy of international growth, technology differentiation, and shareholder returns, navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 oil price collapse, and the ongoing cyclical downturn in North American activity. The company that began with a borrowed pump and a wooden mixing box in 1919 has become a $22 billion global enterprise, but the entrepreneurial spirit of its founder—'We will get there, somehow'—remains embedded in its culture.