Purchase this book from amazon.co.uk

Michael Oristaglio, a geophysicist, has worked as a research scientists and manager in the oil industry for the past 25 years. He lives in Newtown, Connecticut.

Alexander Dorozynski is a science journalist and author. He has written biographies on Nobel-prize winning Soviet physicist Lev Landau and on Bolshevik leader Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov (Lenin). He lives in Madeira, Portugal, and is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences.

A Sixth Sense

The Life and Science of Henri-Georges Doll

Michael Oristaglio and Alexander Dorozynski

‘When I got out of the Navy at the end of World War II, I decided that I would never again stand up when somebody walked in my office because he had a higher rank than me. Mr. Doll was the kind of man for whom, when he walked into your office, you just naturally stood up’ American physicist Jay Tittman

On March 18, 1940, French army lieutenant Henri-Georges Doll came to the U.S. embassy in Paris to give a deposition before American Vice-Consul John Wood. In September 1939, Germany had invaded Poland, and Europe was at war.

Doll's deposition had nothing to do with the war. He had come to the ambassy 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 type of metal detector that would prove invaluable in coping with the enormous number of land mines planted in European soil during World War II, thereby saving countless lives.

Henry-George 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 story of a man at the core of scientific innovation, a brilliant mind that blazed a trail for much of what we know today about remote sensing and oil exploration.