Halliburton Company did not start as an oil company at all. It began in 1919 in Duncan, Oklahoma, founded by Erle P. Halliburton as a business built around one specific job: cementing oil wells.
From that narrow starting point it grew into one of the largest providers of products and services to the oil and gas industry anywhere in the world, supplying the equipment and services used in drilling, well completion and production. The company most people now recognize mainly from the news maintains dual headquarters today in Houston, Texas and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, a long way in both distance and scale from a single cementing business in a small Oklahoma town.