"The faster the drill rotated, the less discomfort the patient experienced."
Malvin E. Ring, dentistry historian
As long as 5,000 years ago, people were using bow drills to bore into teeth. Later, the Greeks and Romans drilled teeth for rudimentary purposes, but the art was lost in the Dark Ages. Precision drilling was reinvented by French physician Pierre Fauchard in 1728, but many crucial subsequent developments came from the United States. George Washington's dentist, John Greenwood, developed the first powered drill, enabling more accurate and faster drilling through the use of a foot treadle (taken from a spinning wheel).
Englishman George Harrington refined this with a motor in 1864, but the most important developments of the era were by an American engineer and inventor, George F. Green from Kalamazoo, Michigan. In 186S Green redesigned Harrington's drill using compressed air. He had worked on several prototypes while employed by the S. S. White Company of Philadelphia, the largest dental supplies manufacturer of the time. His pneumatic device was heavy and slow, but it improved upon the speed, 100 revolutions per minute (rpm), of hand drills at least fivefold.
By 1875, Green—whose other inventions included an electric railway and a grain binder—had perfected and patented an electric drill, which revolutionized dentistry Forty years later speeds were up to 3,000 rpm, and today they can exceed 400,000 rpm.
