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Bullets & Bandits. Jacobsen didn't pick the oil business; it picked him. A farmer's son, he was born in Copenhagen. At 14, he quit school to clerk in a wholesale dry-goods store, studied accounting and languages at night school. At 18, he went to Mexico, where he spent the next ten years clerking for a hardware firm, an American lawyer, and the Bank of Montreal's Mexico City branch. He became such a walking encyclopedia of Mexican land laws that the British-owned Mexican Eagle Oil Co. hired him as assistant secretary. Within ten months he went to Tampico as the company's assistant general manager, helped run it through chronic revolutions when roving bandits were as plentiful as oil. At 32, Jacobsen became boss of Mexican Eagle.
Mexican Eagle's chief geologist was a young Kansan named Everette Lee De Golyer. He quit in 1914, and persuaded Lord Cowdray, who owned Mexican Eagle, to put up $1,000,000 to launch an American company to seek oil in America and Canada and call it Amerada. From the first, Cowdray—who died in 1927—laid down the general rule that Amerada has followed: drill up the profits, thus pyramid them in the ground. Jacobsen joined Amerada as a vice president in 1926, five years after Mexican Eagle was sold to Royal Dutch-Shell. He took Cowdray's maxim to heart.
De Golyer had already made Amerada a small success, though he was still dissatisfied with the current methods of finding oil. They depended chiefly on surface geologic signs, whereas he wanted a more scientific method that would tell what was underground. In the early '20s, using a Hungarian invention called the "torsion balance" (it measured minute variations in the earth's gravity pull), De Golyer found that he could locate salt domes along the Texas Gulf Coast, and that oil frequently accompanied the domes. But the torsion balance did not work well in hilly land. So De Golyer experimented with the refraction seismograph, which had been developed from a German artillery-spotting device. With it, he was more successful in finding oil. Use of the refraction seismograph spread, and it remained the top oil-prospecting tool until 1929. Amerada, meanwhile, had bought up and perfected Professor Reginald Fessenden's patent on a new device, from which Amerada geologist J. C. Karcher developed the modern reflection seismograph. Its "echo" principle permitted much more accurate underground mapping. Amerada learned to use it so well that the company soon dominated the whole U.S. field of petroleum geophysics.