Envision the Roaring Twenties. AIME, fresh off its 50th anniversary described in the May column, opened its 125th meeting in New York City in 1922 with a mining-camp bar room, including a 7-m (24-ft) bar and denizens of the Old West to match, set up on the fifth floor of the Engineering Societies Building. The local sections (21 at this point) held their first Convention of Local Sections — a meeting that continues at SME in some form today (Phoenix in 2020 as the Sections Best Practices Meeting). As one who has attended numerous local section meetings at the SME Annual Conference, reading the reports from these earlier meetings (including this one) demonstrates that some things never change —then the relationship between the local sections and the Institute, today with the Society. The Petroleum Division was established that same year, although the first petroleum paper was published in Transactions in 1879 (The Bradford Oil District of Pennsylvania). As documented by S. Harries Darrow, one of the AIME founders, in his book Coal, Iron and Oil or The Practical American Miner (1866) petroleum was part of the Institute from the beginning. The Petroleum Division’s roots dated from a 1913 standing technical committee whose first chair, Anthony Lucas, established the salt deposits/sulfur/oil relationship while working as a mining engineer at salt mines in Louisiana.
