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The founder

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Donald C. Barton

Donald C. Barton was given SEG membership number 1 and that distinction, although the result of alphabetical accident, was appropriate for at least two historic professional ac-complishments. Barton was the first explorationist to discover commercial amounts of petroleum via a geophysical technique and was the prime mover in creating, only a few years after geophysical exploration had begun, a professional society dedicated to the emerging discipline.

Geophysics did not exist as a profession when Barton was born in 1889 in Stow, Massachusetts, USA. He entered Harvard in 1907 and earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctorate from that university by 1914. He spent two years on the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, and then joined the Empire Gas and Fuel Company. Barton served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps in Europe during World War I as did John C. Karcher. However, The History of Geophysical Prospecting by George Elliott Sweet (the source of most of this biographical material) does not indicate any contact at that time between these two seminal figures in applied geophysics. They, in . . . [Full Text of this Article]