Background
William Wrather was born on January 20, 1883, on his maternal grandparents' farm near Brandenburg, Kentucky, the son of Richard Anselm Wrather and Glovy Washington Munford.
William Wrather was born on January 20, 1883, on his maternal grandparents' farm near Brandenburg, Kentucky, the son of Richard Anselm Wrather and Glovy Washington Munford.
At the age of fifteen he moved to Chicago, to attend high school. At the University of Chicago, from which he received the Ph. B. in 1908, Wrather met Harold Ickes when both were studying law.
But Wrather abandoned law for geology at the instigation of one of his teachers, Rollin D. Salisbury, after spending the summer of 1907 in Montana with a field party of the U. S. Geological Survey. When reduced appropriations kept him from rejoining the Survey in 1908, he followed a friend to the oil fields of the Southwest.
There he became a scout for the J. M. Guffey Company (soon merged into Gulf Oil). For Gulf Oil, Wrather leased a number of areas in Texas, on the basis of his geological mapping, that later proved productive. He also initiated the analysis of the deep well at Spur that proved important for the development of oil production in the Permian Basin. But the company's indifference to his reports of structures that promised oil made Wrather impatient. Early in 1916, shortly after he helped found what became the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, he resigned from Gulf to become an independent consultant. Wrather's search for someone who would act on his geological advice, compensating him with a part interest, led him to Michael L. Benedum, a wildcatter. Their partnership resulted in the discovery of the Desdemona field in September 1918 and the Nigger Creek field in 1926. After the Desdemona boom (1918-1919) Wrather moved to Dallas, where he continued his independent consulting, resisting all suggestions that he form an organization. Benedum's consolidation of his holdings into the Transcontinental Oil Company in 1919 left Wrather, who took his share in cash, with about $1 million. Beginning in 1919, Wrather's consulting work was largely the valuation of oil properties for both the Internal Revenue Service and investors. In 1926 he established the value of Amerada Petroleum Corporation for Dillon, Read and Company, which financed the purchase of the British minority interest. Ten years later Wrather helped his lifelong friend E. L. De Golyer appraise the Texas Company, which refinanced its debt just before it bought half of Standard Oil's concessions in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Like most petroleum geologists, Wrather supported the running of each oil field as a unit to maximize its producing life, contrary to the wasteful American practice of the time. In 1932-1933 he tried, on behalf of the producing companies, to unitize the Hobbs field in New Mexico, then threatened by flooding. Although unitization failed, Wrather succeeded in stemming the incursion of water. From 1936 to 1938 he helped defend the unitization of the Kettleman Hills field in California against a prolonged legal attack. His financial independence after 1918 left Wrather free to work in professional organizations and to travel. He was president of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 1922-1923, beginning a program of research that led to three volumes on American oil fields, and of the Society of Economic Geologists in 1934. As president of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers (AIME) in 1948, he began the reorganization that led to autonomy for each of the three major membership groups--mining, metallurgical, and petroleum engineers. He was treasurer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science from 1943 until 1954. From the time of his first trip to Rumanian oil fields for the Benedum Trees interests in 1925 until illness forced him into a wheelchair in the 1950's, Wrather traveled all over the world.
William Embry Wrather died on November 28, 1963.
From 1943, William Embry Wrather was an honorary member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.
On December 30, 1910, William Wrather married Alice Mildred Dolling; they had four children.