

Some types of hand-held drills are also used to drive screws and other fasteners. Oil wells, water wells, or holes for geothermal heating are created with large drilling rigs. Drilling rigs are used to bore holes in the earth to obtain water or oil. Drills with a percussive action ( hammer drills) are mostly used in hard materials such as masonry (brick, concrete and stone) or rock. There are many types of drills: some are powered manually, others use electricity (electric drill) or compressed air ( pneumatic drill) as the motive power, and a minority are driven by an internal combustion engine (for example, earth drilling augers). Over the last century the electric drill has been created in a variety of types and multiple sizes for an assortment of specific uses. This was the start of the modern drill era.
Compact electric drill portable#
In 1917 the first trigger-switch, pistol-grip portable drill was patented by Black & Decker. In 1895, the first portable handheld drill was created by brothers Wilhelm & Carl Fein of Stuttgart, Germany. It is credited to Arthur James Arnot and William Blanch Brain of Melbourne, Australia who patented the electric drill in 1889. The next great advancement in drilling technology, the electric motor, led to the invention of the electric drill. Drill presses consisted of the powered drills that could be raised or lowered into a material, allowing for less force by the user. Also worth briefly discussing are the early drill presses they were machine tools that derived from bow-drills but were powered by windmills or water wheels. In 1835 Isaac Singer is reported to have built a steam powered churn drill based on the method the Chinese used. The churn drill appears in Europe during the 12th century. Churn drills in ancient China were built of wood and labor-intensive, but were able to go through solid rock. In the East, churn drills were invented as early as 221 BC during the Chinese Qin Dynasty, capable of reaching a depth of 1500 m. The gimlet is also worth mentioning as it is a scaled down version of an auger. The auger uses a rotating helical screw similar to the Archimedean screw-shaped bit that is common today.

The bit is interchangeable as bits wear down. The brace, on the upper half, is where the user holds and turns it and on the lower part is the bit. It is a type of hand crank drill that consists of two parts as seen in the picture.

It is uncertain when the brace and bit was invented however, the earliest picture found so far dates from the 15th century. The auger allowed for more torque for larger holes. While the pump-drill and the bow-drill were used in Western Civilization to bore smaller holes for a larger part of human history, the auger was used to drill larger holes starting sometime between Roman and Medieval ages. This completely separates the inner stone or wood from the rest, allowing the drill to pulverize less material to create a similarly sized hole. This allowed a hole to be drilled while only actually grinding the outer section of it. The hollow-borer tip, first used around the 13th century, consisted of a stick with a tubular shaped piece of metal on the end, such as copper. It consists of a vertical spindle aligned by a piece of horizontal wood and a flywheel to maintain accuracy and momentum. The pump drill was invented during Roman times. The core drill was developed in ancient Egypt by 3000 BC. Over the years many slight variations of bow and strap drills have developed for the various uses of either boring through materials or lighting fires. The usage of bow-drills was widely spread through Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America, during ancient times and is still used today. The earliest evidence of these tools being used in Egypt dates back to around 2500 BCE. There are hieroglyphs depicting Egyptian carpenters and bead makers in a tomb at Thebes using bow-drills. Archaeologists discovered a Neolithic grave yard in Mehrgarh, Pakistan, dating from the time of the Harappans, around 7,500–9,000 years ago, containing nine adult bodies with a total of eleven teeth that had been drilled. Mainly used to create fire, bow-drills were also used in ancient woodwork, stonework, and dentistry. It was discovered that tying a cord around a stick, and then attaching the ends of the string to the ends of a stick (a bow), allowed a user to drill quicker and more efficiently. Bow drill (strap-drill) are the first machine drills, as they convert a back and forth motion to a rotary motion, and they can be traced back to around 10,000 years ago.
