Inventor of the technology for oil drilling
Armais Sergeevich Arutunoff was an inventor of technology for oil drilling. He was born in Tiflis, then part of the Russian Empire, into an Armenian family. He emigrated to the United States in 1923, and moved to Oklahoma in 1928, where he started a company to build an electric submersible pump for use at the bottom of oil boreholes. Before moving to the U.S., he had formed a small company of his own, called Reda (an acronym of Russian Electrical Dynamo of Arutunoff), to manufacture his idea for electric submergible motors. He later settled in Germany and then moved with his wife and one-year-old daughter to the United States settling in Michigan, then Los Angeles, and ultimately opened his company in Bartlesville.
The petroleum industry immediately showed interest in his inventions and he formed Bart Manufacturing Company. One of his pumps and motors soon were installed in an oil well near Burns, Kansas – the first equipment of its kind to be used in a well. News spread quickly and by 1930 the company was expanded and renamed Reda Pump Company. It later became a division of TRW Inc. in 1939. By 1938 it is estimated that two percent of all oil produced in the US was lifted by an Arutunoff pump. Arutunoff’s company held 60 patents for industrial equipment, including the Electrodrill, which aided scientists in penetrating through the Antarctic ice cap for the first time in 1967. A joint resolution later was passed by the Oklahoma House and Senate naming him “Mr. Americanism of Bartlesville.” He was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1974.
Fun fact
Armais Arutunoff built the first centrifugal pump while living in Germany and built the first submergible pump and motor in the United States while living in Los Angeles, California. No one would even consider his inventions until friends at Phillips Petroleum Company encouraged him to form his own company in Bartlesville.
