Boom Technologies
By the end of World War Two, earlier oil discoveries in Alberta had stalled—no new sites had been discovered in a quarter century. This changed in 1947, when, following a large-scale and secret geophysical study of the province by Imperial Oil, the company sunk an explanatory wellsite over a geological anomaly south of Edmonton, and struck oil. Imperial and several other companies quickly drilled additional wells nearby.
This discovery quickly made oil Alberta’s primary industry and led to a rapid growth in technical companies providing services connected to the oil industry. Included among these were geophysical and surveying instrument companies capitalising on the new interest in analysing Alberta’s landscape to discover oil resources. The University of Alberta made its first geophysics appointment in 1954, reflecting the growing need for specialist scientists with training in the area. In the mid-1960s, Dietzgen of Canada Ltd. a subsidiary of Chicago company Eugene Dietzgen Drafting Company with a branch in Calgary, sold $25,539.00 of equipment to the Government of Alberta, suggesting the significant importance of surveying and mapping in the province.
An advertising article about Southwestern in the Alberta Industrial Newsletter, February 1960
From the 1950s through the 1970s and beyond, Alberta became a hub of exploratory geophysics, with many associated laboratories and companies involved, including Canadian sites. An early example of a company in Alberta specialising in geophysical equipment was Calgary’s Southwestern Industrial Electronics (Canada) Ltd.. The company was established in 1950 as a Canadian-owned subsidiary by a Texas company, Dresser Industries, and was active in supplying equipment and training people to use it into the late 1960s. Imperial Oil itself ran a geophysical laboratory in Calgary into the 21st century, which boasted an array of equipment, such as the instrument pictured below, possibly designed and made at the laboratory and part of Ingenium's collection.
A soil testing instrument used at Imperial Oil's geophysical laboratories in Calgary, AB. Today, the instrument is part of Ingenium's collections (Artifact no. 2014.0432).
Providing other types of technical support to the industry were homegrown companies like Edmonton’s Dominion Instruments Ltd., founded in 1945 by aircraft engineer Thomas ‘Ed’ Adams. By 1969, the company was designing and manufacturing speciality instruments for the energy industry. In the early 1970s, they were acquired by industrial research company Western Research & Development and supplying technical support to a 1970 project with their oil and gas industry parent company Bow Valley Industries Ltd. and the federal government in measuring and reducing sulfur dioxide emissions from sulfur plants. This type of project was to become an increasing focus for scientific and precision makers in Alberta, as interest in the intersection and impact of industry on the natural environment and human health became a increasing concern.