Home |  PublicationsEncyclopedia |  Submergible Pump

The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture The Oklahoma Historical Society Oklahoma City, Oklahoma January 15, 2010

SUBMERGIBLE PUMP.

In 1916, immediately prior to the Russian Revolution, a Russian engineer developed a submergible electric motor/centrifugal pump that could be used in water wells, mines, and ships. The inventor was Armais Sergeevich Arutunoff, born in the Caucasus Mountains in 1893. After immigrating to the United States in 1923, in 1928 he came to Bartlesville, Oklahoma, to work for Phillips Petroleum Company. With Phillips's backing, he refined his pump for use in oil wells and first successfully demonstrated it in a well in Kansas. The device was manufactured by Bart Manufacturing Company, which in 1930 changed its name to REDA Pump, with the letters representing the words "Russian Electrical Dynamo of Arutunoff."

The electric submergible pump (commonly called ESP) was a self-contained unit forty feet long and four inches in diameter. Suspended by steel cables, it was dropped down the well casing into oil or water and turned on, creating a suction that would lift the liquid to the surface formation through pipes. The ESP was used successfully to increase production in very deep wells. A boon to the industry, the unit quickly replaced the old-fashioned, mechanical lifts formerly used in the oil fields.

REDA expanded to cover nine acres north of Bartlesville. At the end of the twentieth century the company was the world's largest manufacturer of ESP systems and was part of Schlumberger.

A holder of more than ninety patents in the United States, Armais Arutunoff died in February 1978 in Bartlesville. He is represented in the Oklahoma Hall of Fame.

Dianna Everett

Bibliography

Gerald Forbes, Flush Production: The Epic of Oil in the Gulf-Southwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1942).

Who's Who in America (38th ed.; New Providence, N.J.: A. N. Marquis, 1974–75).

Joe Williams, Bartlesville: Remembrances of Times Past, Reflections of Today (Bartlesville, Okla.: TRW Reda Pump Division, 1978).


Browse By Topic

Petroleum Industry

Explore

Objects

Citation

The following (as per The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition) is the preferred citation for articles:
Dianna Everett, “Submergible Pump,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=SU001.

Published January 15, 2010

Copyright and Terms of Use

No part of this site may be construed as in the public domain.

Copyright to all articles and other content in the online and print versions of The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History is held by the Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS). This includes individual articles (copyright to OHS by author assignment) and corporately (as a complete body of work), including web design, graphics, searching functions, and listing/browsing methods. Copyright to all of these materials is protected under United States and International law.

Users agree not to download, copy, modify, sell, lease, rent, reprint, or otherwise distribute these materials, or to link to these materials on another web site, without authorization of the Oklahoma Historical Society. Individual users must determine if their use of the Materials falls under United States copyright law's "Fair Use" guidelines and does not infringe on the proprietary rights of the Oklahoma Historical Society as the legal copyright holder of The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and part or in whole.