HENRI-GEORGES DOLL was a true pioneer of modern applied science - one of the great, but little known French and American inventors of the 20th century. A Sixth Sense is the first biography of a man who became a founder of oilfield giant Schlumberger, and blazed a trail during the golden age of oil exploration for much of what we know today about remote sensing.

From the Introduction
ON MARCH 18, 1940, FRENCH ARMY LIEUTENANT HENRI-GEORGES DOLL came to the United States Embassy in Paris to give a deposition. Europe was at war: In September 1939, Germany had invaded Poland. England and France had declared war on Germany, while the United States and Italy remained neutral. Doll, a geophysicist and engineer, had been mobilized to the front. But he was quickly recalled to Paris to work on a radical new device for detecting the German land mines that French intelligence had learned were being deployed on a vast scale.

Doll's deposition, however, had nothing to do with the war. He had come to the embassy that day to testify in a patent lawsuit pending in Houston, Texas: Schlumberger Well Surveying Corporation v. Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company. It marked one of the first great industrial battles for control of the technology of oil and gas exploration.

Doll was demobilized after the occupation of France, but did not stay out of the war for long. He escaped to the United States and, in a secret project for the U.S. army, developed a new kind of mobile metal detector that would prove invaluable in coping with the millions of land mines planted in European soil during World War II, thereby saving countless lives.

A few years later, a similar device - modified to fit in a drill hole - would revolutionize the postwar search for oil... ...