“I have little patience with scientists who... drill...holes where drilling is easy."
Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist
Stone Age man figured out that spinning a sharp rock on a wooden board would produce a circular hole—a useful discovery. The application of a bow to such a drill increased the rate of spinning and therefore the speed of boring the hole. By the nineteenth century, the bow had been replaced by geared machinery and the stone bit by metal, but otherwise the concept remained basically the same.
Prior to the early 1860s, the standard drill bit consisted simply of a flattened, sharpened piece of metal. These "spade bits" were notoriously imprecise and also prone to rapid dulling when used on hard surfaces. American Stephen Morse believed that he could improve the standard drill bit, and, in 1861, he patented what has now become known as the twist drill. The device was the early version of the now- familiar helical drill. Consisting of a sharpened cutting edge with a spiral groove twisting upward along the shaft of the bit, it represented a great leap forward. The radial groove proved to serve as a guide, actually pulling the bit down through the substance being drilled and producing a round hole, but also routed the remnants of the bored substance up and out of the hole onto the surface by acting as a screw.
Though the bits that are around today are made of harder metal, the same basic concept predominates today, as does the company Morse founded.
