Reuben C. Baker

Reuben Carlton Baker worked as a contract driller in the California oil fields, including Kern River and Coalinga, before his main invention. He was granted U.S. Patent No. 860,115 for the Well Casing Shoe on July 16, 1907, a device that kept oil flowing through a well while casing was run. He founded the Baker Casing Shoe Company in 1913 in Coalinga to manufacture and license casing accessories, and held more than 150 patents despite limited formal schooling. His inventions came out of problems he met in the field rather than from a laboratory.

Baker Hughes dates from a 1987 merger, but both halves were built on early drilling patents. Reuben C. Baker was drilling in the Coalinga field in California when he patented the Baker Well Casing Shoe on July 16, 1907. Before it, running steel casing to the bottom of a hole without collapsing the wellbore was slow and unreliable; the shoe guided casing down the hole and let it be cemented in place, and the design stayed essentially unchanged for about 40 years. Baker created the Baker Casing Shoe Company in 1913, renamed it Baker Oil Tools in 1928 as the product range widened into completion and production equipment, and the group was reorganised as Baker International Corporation in 1976. In Texas, Howard R. Hughes Sr. attacked the other bottleneck, drilling through hard rock. Fishtail bits scraped rather than cut, which stopped progress in formations like those around Spindletop. With Walter B. Sharp he tested a dual-cone roller bit at Goose Creek, Texas, and was granted patents on August 10, 1909; its hardened steel cones crushed rock and let drillers reach deeper reserves. Sharp-Hughes Tool Company leased rather than sold the bits, and after Sharp died in 1912 Hughes bought his stake and renamed the business Hughes Tool Company in 1915. The two companies ran independently for nearly eighty years until the oil bust of the 1980s pushed them together in April 1987.