This next story amused our staff to no end when they found the first of the newspaper stories. Wattenburg seemed excited himself when we showed him how widely the story had been publicized around the world. He said that he hadn’t realized it at the time.
In 1974, Wattenburg again embarrassed government scientists and bureaucrats alike. He saved the country millions of dollars during the first oil crisis when he showed that he could measure how much oil was in oil refinery storage tanks by simply pointing a special infra-red camera at the tanks from a distance. This story was first reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, February 6, 1974, with the headline: “How to See Inside Their Oil Tanks”.
During the oil crisis, Energy Department officials announced that they were going to use a thousand FBI agents to crawl into all the oil tanks in all the refineries of the country to see how much gas and oil the oil companies were hoarding. Embarrassed officials in Washington quickly cancelled their plans to use FBI agents after the story of Wattenburg’s feat was carried by the wire services all over the country.
Wattenburg treated the viewers of the ABC network to a dramatic film that showed how he stood back at a distance and measured the oil levels in all the storage tanks at the Richmond, California, Chevron Oil Co. refinery—without really trying! As his special TV-like camera scanned the tank farm, the screen showed the surface of each oil tank glowing brightly up to the liquid level in the tank. The empty upper portion of each tank showed black. The liquid levels of a hundred oil tanks in the distance could be measured to an accuracy of 5% just by looking at their images on the camera screen.
Wattenburg had made the film in a few minutes using a commercially available infra-red TV camera—from a distance of a mile away! He showed that the government could easily measure the oil in all the refinery tank farms of the country. He proved that they could do this in a day by simply flying over the tank farms with military reconnaissance aircraft that carried the same infra-red camera.
This is the story he gave one reporter at the time:
The idea came to him when he remembered that water tanks on the farms near where he grew up often had a very visible dew line on them early in the morning because the portion of the tank filled with water stayed at a warmer temperature overnight than the empty upper portion that was cooled down by the nighttime air temperature. Conversely, the sun warmed the upper surface more quickly than the lower surface in the afternoon. This meant that the portions of oil tanks filled with oil would be warmer in the morning and cooler in the evening than the empty portions which followed the local air temperature. This temperature difference is easily measured and displayed by infra-red TV cameras of the kind Wattenburg borrowed for his dramatic experiment (Thermovision by AGA Corporation). This technology was first developed for satellite reconnaissance of rocket launchings (Wattenburg worked on this as a consultant to Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. in 1965–1968.)
The congressional subcommittee that had initially insisted that the Energy Department use FBI agents later asked Wattenburg to testify at a hearing in Washington. They wanted to investigate why the Energy Dept. had not thought of his idea. He wrote the committee staff a widely publicized letter in which he gave them complete instructions on how to do it themselves and where they could find a suitable infra-red camera in the Pentagon! He suggested that this would save the taxpayers his airfare—and that “they would really find it a lot more fun to do it themselves.”
The subcommittee staff insisted that he appear. Then he wrote back that he would be delighted to appear because he had “just discovered something else that your subcommittee has told a government agency to do that is even more foolish than using FBI agents to crawl into oil tanks.” They evidently cancelled the hearing.