Drilling or “making hole” began long before oil or natural gas were anything more than flammable curiosities found seeping from the ground. For centuries, digging by hand or shovel was the best technology that existed to pry into the earth’s secrets.

Then the spring pole harnessed the resiliency of a bent tree to assist in pummeling a hole into the ground to find water. Ancient histories record the technique, which is still used in some corners of the world. While repeatedly kicking down a stirrup was primitive and slow, the spring pole’s rope and chisel were practical drilling technologies.

A decade before the birth of the petroleum industry, Samuel Kier sold 50-cent, half-pint bottles of Pennsylvania oil proclaiming its "Wonderful Medical Virtues." His advertisements featured cable tool derricks drilling brine wells. (Graphics courtesy of American Oil and Gas Historical Society)
Salt was an essential commodity for preserving food, and extracting it from brine was a simple process. In 1802 in what is now West Virginia, brine drillers David and Joseph Ruffner took 18-months to drill through 40 ft (12 m) of bedrock to a total depth of 58 ft (17 m) using a spring pole.

The Ruffner brothers' drilling ingenuity and innovation made the Kanawha River Valley, a major salt manufacturing and distribution center in the early 1800s. Many early drilling technologies were developed there.

Although there was money to be made from salt brine wells, sometimes a good well would be fouled with the intrusion of unsought and unwanted oil. The rainbow sheen and pungent smell of oil was bad news to brine drillers.

The cable tool rig

The advent of cable tool drilling introduced the wooden derrick into the changing American landscape.

Using the same basic notion of chiseling a hole deeper and deeper into the earth, but adding the miracle of steam power and clever mechanical engineering, wells could be drilled far more efficiently. Frequent stops were needed to remove the chipped-away rock and other material, bail out water — and sharpen the bit.

The "spring pole," a simple but highly effective technology for drilling shallow water wells, dates back to thousands of years.
Bull wheels and hemp rope repeatedly hoisted and dropped heavy iron drill strings and a curious variety of bits deep into the borehole. Oil was still an adversary to those in search of either fresh water or brine. However, savvy businessmen like the Ruffner brothers and Samuel Kier of Tarentum, Pa., learned to profit from this oil.

It had long been recognized that oil could be collected and used as a medicine; lubricant; and even a foul-smelling, smoky illuminant. American Indians gathered oil by using blankets to soak it up from natural seeps. The Ruffner brothers sold their oil to marketers of patent medicines and lubrication products.

Kier sold his Petroleum or “Rock Oil” in half-pint bottles as a guaranteed curative for all manner of aches and pains. His advertisements prominently featured cable tool derricks drilling for brine, water saturated with salt.

When a Yale chemist, Benjamin Silliman, found that oil could be distilled into a kerosene illuminant, the world changed forever. Inspired entrepreneurs formed the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Co. with the notion of using cable tool drilling to extract large volumes of oil they hoped to find near Pennsylvania’s best-known oil seep at Oil Creek. It worked, and the petroleum age was born.

Kier soon abandoned patent medicine and went into the kerosene refining business, buying all the oil he could get.

“Colonel” Edwin Drake’s 1859 discovery brought the oil boom. Soon, cable tool rigs were everywhere, pounding into the earth, searching for oil. In June 1860, J.C. Rathbone used a steam engine to power a rig and produced a 100-b/d gusher at only 140 ft (43 m). In Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio, the soft soil yielded to cable-tool drilling. But farther west, oilmen found resistant rock strata that made drilling far more difficult.

The rotary rig

A new technology answered the call of necessity and the lure of opportunity. Rotary drilling is most often associated with the spectacular Spindletop Hill discovery near Beaumont, Texas, in 1901.

Fishtail bits became obsolete in 1909 when Howard Hughes Sr. introduced the twin-cone roller bit. Rather than scraping the rock, a milled tooth bit drilled by gouging, crushing and powdering the rock as it turned.
Instead of the repetitive lift and drop of heavy cable-tool bits, rotary drilling introduced the hollow drill stem that enabled broken rock debris to be washed out of the borehole with re-circulated mud while the rotating drill bit cut deeper.

Rotary drilling uses fluids (drilling mud) to circulate out the rock as it is chipped away. The fluid washes out the drill hole as it goes, making the process more efficient. Drilling mud also stops an oil well from bursting forth unexpectedly — gushers. Meanwhile, grinding their way through layers of rock rather than pounding, the heavy fishtail bits made history.

Rotary rigs soon became the preferred means of drilling for oil, although to this day they still share the oilpatch with a few cable tool rigs. The change in technology was not without friction. Cable tool drillers sometimes referred to rotary drillers as “swivelnecks” or “mud hogs” while the rotary men called their cable tool contemporaries “ropechokers” or “jarheads.”

According to one ropechoker, “If your hole ain’t straight when you’re drilling with cable tools, you’re plumb out of luck — you can’t get any motion on the tools, and the casing won’t go in. But a crooked hole don’t mean anything with a rotary; they’re crooked more often than not.”

The record depth recorded for a cable tool rig is 11,145 ft (3,397 m). On Russia’s Kola Peninsula, a rotary rig reached more than 40,000 ft (12,195 m) after 10 years of drilling.

Fishtail bits became obsolete in 1909 when Howard Hughes Sr. introduced the twin-cone roller bit. History remembers several men who were trying to develop better drill bit technologies, but it was Hughes who made it happen. The Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) notes that about the same time Hughes developed his bit, Granville A. Humason of Shreveport, La., patented the first cross-roller rock bit, the forerunner of the Reed cross-roller bit.

More innovations followed. Frank Christensen and George Christensen developed the earliest diamond bit in 1941. The tungsten carbide tooth came into use in the early 1950s. The company Hughes founded would merge in 1987 with one founded in 1927 by Carl Baker (Baker Oil Tool).

Just 6 years later, near Conroe, Texas, the new science of directional drilling made news when a Long Beach, Calif., company begun by H. (Harlan) John Eastman was called in to stanch a 6,000 b/d oilfield blowout.

“Slanted oil wells are the latest sensation of the oil industry,” begins a May 1934 Popular Science Monthly article, reporting Eastman’s technological success. “Only a handful of men in the world have the strange power to make a bit, rotating a mile belowground at the end of a steel drill pipe, snake its way in a curve or around a dog-leg angle, to reach a desired objective.”

By 1973, Eastman Whipstock Inc. was the world’s largest directional drilling company with manufacturing plants in Houston, Abilene, Texas, and New Iberia, La. Eastman then joined with the Norton Christensen Co. to form Eastman Christensen in 1986.

In 1990, Baker Hughes purchased Eastman Christensen, which in 1992 resulted in the industry’s first rolling cone bit company and first diamond bit company becoming today’s Hughes Christensen, a Baker Hughes Co.

The search for oil continues today, building on history's successes. Almost 3,000 rotary rigs are at work around the world, and drilling technology continues to evolve, making history along the way.

Editor’s Note – Biographers note that Howard Hughes Sr. met Granville Humason in a Shreveport, La., bar, where Humason sold his roller bit rights to Hughes for US $150. The University of Texas’ Center for American History has a 1951 recording of Granville Humason’s recollections of that chance meeting. Humason recalled he spent $50 of his sale proceeds at the bar during the balance of the evening. Another oilfield legend was born.