The appearance of the IBM CPC in the context of Houston and reservoir modeling during the early fifties leads backwards into the history of technology at Humble Oil. Humble was among the earliest adopters of new technologies, notably reflection seismology and the use of microscopic fossils in core samples to correlate rock strata across Texas and Louisiana. Humble researchers such as Thomas Moore and Stuart Buckley helped establish the physical principles governing how oil, gas, and water move underground under pressure, and their work shifted drilling from rapid, wasteful extraction to controlled pressure management, dramatically increasing long-term field recovery rates. Moore joined Humble in the late twenties and quickly rose to head the company’s Production Research Division in Houston, recruiting chemical engineers, physicists, and mathematicians from universities like MIT and Caltech, establishing Humble as a corporate research center on the level of Bell Labs and DuPont.
Humble built its flagship Baytown Refinery near Houston and it quickly became a testbed for modern chemical engineering. During World War II, Humble’s Baytown operations were essential to the Allied war effort. Humble pioneered processes for producing high-octane aviation gasoline and synthesizing toluene for TNT, and collaborated with Standard Oil researchers to deploy and scale fluid catalytic cracking processes for breaking heavy crude fractions into high-value motor fuels at unprecedented yields. Baytown became an early model for integrated refinery-petrochemical complexes, manufacturing butyl rubber, synthetic solvents, and specialized lubricants. In the fifties and sixties, Humble was an early corporate adopter of mainframe computers to run both reservoir simulations and complex linear programming models for refinery optimization. Humble’s technological footprint extended directly into space exploration. In the late thirties, Humble purchased the 30,000-acre West Ranch near Clear Lake Texas. In 1961, Humble donated a 1,000-acre parcel of this land to Rice University, which then deeded it to the federal government for the construction of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center, renamed the Johnson Space Center in 1973. The remaining acreage was developed into the Clear Lake City master-planned community and the Bayport Industrial District, explicitly designed to support space and chemical technology industries.
Miles Leverett was one of Moore’s chemical engineering hires from MIT in 1938, where at the same time Richard Feynman was completing his studies in physics. Leverett was soon at the forefront of important work on reservoir modeling at Humble, and the resulting Buckley-Leverett equation remains a well-known landmark today. In 1942, Leverett’s boss Moore seemingly vanished from Houston, and soon Leverett himself received the call to follow Moore into the Manhattan Project. This was the soon familiar pattern experienced by others at the time, including Feynman who headed west to Los Alamos, with Leverett crossing his path headed north to Chicago and Enrico Fermi, where he was present on December 2, 1942 when the first nuclear reactor achieved a sustained chain-reaction. Leverett and Fermi became co-holders of the fundamental patents for the type of reactor developed in Chicago and soon put into production at Oak Ridge Tennessee. The paths of Leverett and Feynman crossed again at Oak Ridge, where Leverett was leading the production efforts and Feynman visited as the nuclear safety representative of Los Alamos.
What is of special interest in these events is the parallels between the work at Humble and Los Alamos. Both were concerned with the modeling and simulation of fluids, diffusion processes, and heat or energy flows. These were computationally demanding topics on the frontier of what was possible at the time, and naturally led to a broad similarity in computing efforts. The role of the IBM CPC and its precursors at Los Alamos and Humble reflects this fundamental symmetry, and the parallels only increased during the fifties, with the thermonuclear simulations at Los Alamos and the reservoir simulations and birth of the ADI method on Humble's CPC. The essential nature of fluids is that they are the opposite of solids, they can not resist deformation. Solids are static, in contrast with the highly dynamic phenomena encountered in fluids. This is the physical root of the computational challenges that drove advances in modeling and simulation at Humble and Los Alamos. An interesting question is whether Moore and Leverett's work in the Manhattan Project had an influence, later, on Humble's acquisition of a CPC. Certainly the simulation work done on the CPC precursor at Los Alamos was leading-edge, and likewise for the work done later on the CPCs at RAND and Humble. For the CPC's seemingly modest hardware, there was an impressive record of tackling challenging problems. Here's Peaceman discussing the 604 calculator, the digital heart of the CPC.
So that was the state of reservoir modeling when I came to work at Humble in 1951. We had nothing that you could call a computer. We did have access to some accounting machines that the accounting department would let us use, but only at night. Henry Rachford had come to work a year before me and was already playing with an accounting machine called the IBM 604. He, along with the managers of the Production Research Division of Humble, had the vision to see that digital computation was going to be the way to do reservoir modeling and that by using finite-difference methods to solve partial differential equations, we could overcome the limitations of the analytical methods. We wanted to be able to include nonuniform properties, arbitrary geometry, and nonlinearities in the differential equations. ... When I came to work, Henry Rachford and John Rice were already at work on this problem, trying to use the accounting machine, the IBM 604. Let me try to describe this gadget to you. It was called a multiplying punch, and the only input/output that it had was a card reader and card punch. It could only handle fixed-point decimal numbers, with no alphabetic information. The way the accountants used it, say for a payroll application, would be to have some numeric data already punched on each card, such as an employee's identification number and salary. Each card would be read at the read station and would then travel to the punch station. On the way, the marvelous electronic multiply unit would calculate the withholding and social security taxes, subtract them, and then punch the taxes and take-home pay into the blank space on the card. After being punched, the card would then travel to the stacker. To see the results printed, an operator would have to carry the deck of cards to another machine to print the results. The electronic multiply unit was really quite flexible, but programming it was done in a way that we would now consider quaint. There was a board with a lot of holes, and this board could be placed into a holder with terminals in the back. Programming was done by plugging wires from one hole to another. Down one side of the board was a series of holes called program steps. On the other side were holes for various functions, such as reading from a card into electronic registers, adding or multiplying the contents of two registers together, and punching the contents of the registers onto the card. Remember that in those days, all the electronics were done with vacuum tubes. [2]
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| Humble Oil Research Center at Buffalo Speedway, near Rice and River Oaks, 1955. [1] |
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| IBM 604 multiplier, also referred to as the 604 calculator. Multiplication was via digital logic using vacuum tubes. Numerical representation was binary-coded decimal. This was essentially the heart of the IBM CPC, and what made the CPC a digital system. [2] |
[2] Peaceman, Donald W. 1990. "A Personal Retrospection of Reservoir Simulation." In A History of Scientific Computing, edited by Stephen G. Nash, 106–29. New York: ACM Press / Addison-Wesley.
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