# Drilling machine > Turning a bit and feeding it into the work - Date: c. 1430 - Era: Middle Ages - Domain: [Tools & Making](https://lastcodex.org/en/domains/tools/) - Rebuild stage: IV (Science & industry) - Difficulty: 3/5 - URL: https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/drill/ A drilling machine holds a cutting bit in a spindle, turns it and pushes it straight into the work, so that a hole is cut square to the surface at a steady feed. The oldest known drawing of a powered machine of this family, a water-driven borer for wooden water pipes, is in a German manuscript of about 1420–1440; the first printed picture of a machine for boring cast guns appeared in Venice in 1540. Pillar drills with bevel gears and a feed hand wheel were at work in British engineering shops in the first half of the 19th century, before the twist drill of 1863 and the electric hand drill of 1895. ![Drilling machine · Turning a bit and feeding it into the work](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/plate.Ck2gAy_C_Z17aRa4.webp) ## Legend 1. Stepped pulley 2. Bevel gears 3. Feed hand wheel 4. Spindle sliding through the bevel wheel 5. Twist drill in the chuck 6. Table with the work held in a vice ## What it is A drilling machine makes round holes. It holds a cutting tool, the drill or bit, in a spindle, turns it and pushes it into the work along its own axis. A hand-held tool wanders and tilts; the frame of the machine keeps the bit square to the work and lets it advance at an even rate, so that a row of holes comes out straight, at the same depth and in the same direction. The commonest form is the pillar drill, or drill press: a vertical spindle above a table on which the work is clamped. Radial drills carry the spindle on an arm that swings over large pieces, and portable drills put a small motor and the chuck in the hand. Older drills turned their bit back and forth with a bow, as at Mehrgarh for [teeth](/en/inventions/dental-drill/) and beads, or for [making fire](/en/inventions/control-of-fire/). A [lathe](/en/inventions/lathe/) can also drill, by turning the work against a fixed bit. ## How it works On a workshop pillar drill of the 19th century the power came from a belt off an overhead [line shaft](/en/inventions/line-shaft/). The belt ran on a pulley with several steps of different sizes, and moving it from one step to another changed the speed of the spindle: a large drill has to turn slowly, a small one fast. A pair of bevel gears, a small pinion on the horizontal shaft meshing with a wheel laid flat, turned the motion through a right angle and down into the vertical spindle. ![A steel block cut away through a shallow hole, with the conical point of a twist drill resting at its bottom and ribbons of metal curling up from the two spiral grooves](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v1.CWSsBxHW_ZV3GU7.webp) _The two edges at the point shave the metal, and the spiral grooves carry the chips up and out of the hole._ The bit does the cutting. A twist drill has two cutting edges on its conical point, which shave metal from the bottom of the hole as it turns, and two spiral grooves, the flutes, which carry the chips up and out. Stephen Morse's patent of 1863 makes the point: his drill cuts the metal and clears its chips without clogging, where the common flat drill of his day scraped. The spindle has to turn and to move down at the same time. It passes through the hub of the bevel wheel and is driven by a long key that runs in a groove along the spindle, so that it turns with the wheel and still slides through it. Lower down it turns inside a sleeve that does not rotate. The feed hand wheel, through a pinion and a rack cut in that sleeve, pushes the sleeve, the spindle and the bit down into the work; the self-acting feed that Joseph Whitworth patented in 1837 did this automatically. On Whitworth's pillar drill of about 1860 a screw under the table moves it sideways, to bring the marked centre of the hole under the point. The work must be held down. As the edges bite, the drill pulls the work round with it, and a loose plate spins like a blade. It is clamped in a vice or bolted to the table, with a piece of scrap wood or metal underneath so that the bit can break through without cutting the table. ## How to do it This exercise uses a geared hand drill, the kind with a crank and a toothed wheel, which works like the head of a pillar drill in small: the wheel has bevel teeth that turn a pinion on the chuck spindle. You also need a few twist drills, a piece of softwood about 2 cm thick, a strip of aluminium sheet about 1.5 mm thick, a scrap board, two clamps, a centre punch or a nail, a hammer, a square and a larger drill or a countersink. Clamp the scrap board to the bench and the softwood on top of it. Mark the centre of each hole with two crossing pencil lines. Fit a 5 mm drill in the chuck and tighten it by hand until the bit sits straight in the middle; turn the crank slowly and watch that the point does not wobble. ![A geared hand drill standing upright: a crank on a large wheel with bevel teeth driving a small pinion on the chuck spindle, a handle on top, the bit entering a board clamped to a scrap board on a bench](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v2.B9L3rqx0_RNmk6.webp) _A geared hand drill: the crank wheel drives the chuck through bevel teeth, as in the head of a pillar drill._ Set the point on the mark, stand the square beside the drill to check that it is upright, and turn the crank at an even pace while pressing lightly on the top handle. Back the drill out now and then to clear the shavings. When the point breaks through into the scrap board, the hole is finished; without the scrap board the back of the hole would splinter. Compare the curled wood shavings with the chips that come out of metal. For the aluminium, clamp the strip flat on the scrap board, close to the hole. Tap a small dimple at the mark with the centre punch, so that the point cannot skid. Drill a 3 mm hole first, then open it to 6 mm. The chips now come out as long spirals. Remove the sharp burr round each side of the hole by turning a larger drill or a countersink in it by hand. ## History and evolution For thousands of years drills were turned by hand or by a bow, back and forth. The oldest known drawing of a drilling machine driven by another power is in a German picture book of military technology, made on the Upper Rhine about 1420–1440 and now in the Zentralbibliothek in Zürich. Water falling from a chute strikes a small horizontal [water wheel](/en/inventions/water-wheel/) whose upright shaft carries an auger, and the auger bores from below into a log held upright in a frame, to turn it into a water pipe. The oldest printed picture of a machine for boring metal appeared in Venice in 1540, in the _Pirotechnia_ of Vannoccio Biringuccio, a manual of metalworking and gun founding. Its woodcut shows a horizontal machine for boring cast guns. The historian Andrea Bernardoni calls it the first image of a horizontal boring machine and follows its later versions until the end of the 18th century. Drilling machines for general engineering work spread in British workshops in the early 19th century. Richard Roberts opened a small workshop in Manchester in 1816 and within a few years had built a screw-cutting lathe and a range of drilling machines. The Science Museum in London keeps a machine of about 1840 from the mill of Strutt and Arkwright at Milford, used to build cotton machinery: a drill and a slotting machine stand back to back on one cast-iron column, the drill spindle with a bevel wheel and a pulley of five steps, the feed worked by a hand wheel and three gear wheels, all driven by belts from the line shaft. Whitworth's firm built its first power-driven drilling machine in 1847 and later radial drills with a swinging arm. ![Two drills of the same length lying side by side on a piece of leather: a flat spear-point drill whose blade narrows to a sharpened point, and a twist drill with two spiral grooves running up from its conical point](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v3.BFdbqa3x_13Atxl.webp) _The flat spear-point drill and the twist drill that replaced it._ Early machine drills were flat spear-pointed blades; Whitworth's pillar drill of about 1860 still carries one. On 7 April 1863 Stephen A. Morse of East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, was granted US patent 38,119 for a twist drill, and the company he founded the next year still makes cutting tools. Cutting the spiral flutes of such drills was the task for which Brown & Sharpe built its universal [milling machine](/en/inventions/milling-machine/) in 1862. In 1895 mechanics at C. & E. Fein in Stuttgart connected a small electric motor to a drill chuck and made the first portable electric drill, which the firm then produced in series. ## Key facts - Oldest drawing of a powered boring machine: Water-driven, for wooden pipes, Upper Rhine, c. 1420–1440 - First printed picture of a boring machine: Biringuccio, Pirotechnia, Venice, 1540 - Whitworth's self-acting feed: Patented in 1837 - Morse twist drill: US patent 38,119, 7 April 1863 - Portable electric drill: C. & E. Fein, Stuttgart, 1895 ## Requires - [Steel](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/steel/): Iron with just enough carbon (c. 1,000 BCE) - [Gears](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/gear/): Teeth that trade speed for force (c. 350 BCE) - [Plain bearing](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/plain-bearing/): A shaft turning on a film of lubricant (c. 4,700 BCE) - [Water Wheel](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/water-wheel/): A river turned into work (c. 300 BCE) ## Sources - [Zürich, Zentralbibliothek, Ms. Rh. hist. 33b (Bilderhandschrift zur Kriegstechnik, c. 1420–1440), fol. 89r: water-driven boring machine for wooden pipes](https://kdih.badw.de/datenbank/handschrift/39/3/2), Katalog der deutschsprachigen illustrierten Handschriften des Mittelalters (Rainer Leng), Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften - [Zürich, Zentralbibliothek, Ms. Rh. hist. 33b: War technology (Upper Rhine, c. 1420–1440), digitised manuscript, fol. 89r](https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/zbz/Ms-Rh-hist0033b/89r), e-codices, Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland / Zentralbibliothek Zürich - [The biography of a technical picture: Biringuccio's boring machine woodcut (Nuncius 24/2, 2009, pp. 291–311)](https://ricerca.univaq.it/handle/11697/224620), Andrea Bernardoni, Nuncius (Brill) / Università dell'Aquila - [Vannoccio Biringuccio, La Pyrotechnie: cannon-boring machine](https://www.people.vcu.edu/~mjmurphy/history_of_science/biringuccio/biringuccio.html), Virginia Commonwealth University, History of Science - [Drilling and slotting machine, c. 1840, from Strutt and Arkwright's mill at Milford (1954-639)](https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co47597/drill-spindle), Science Museum Group - [Table from Whitworth drilling machine, of 1846 (1931-195)](https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co47687/table-from-whitworth-drilling-machine), Science Museum Group - [Whitworth pillar drilling machine, c. 1860 (Y1974.41/1)](https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8405231/whitworth-pillar-drilling-machine-drill), Science Museum Group - [Richard Roberts (1789–1864)](https://www.erih.net/how-it-started/stories-about-people-biographies/biography/roberts-1), European Route of Industrial Heritage - [Henry Maudslay and the Pioneers of the Machine Age (ed. J. Cantrell and G. Cookson, 2002)](https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2002-cantrell-henrymaudslayandthepioneersofthemachineage.pdf), Tempus Publishing - [US 38,119, Improvement in drill-bits (S. A. Morse, 7 April 1863)](https://patents.google.com/patent/US38119A), Google Patents - [Twist Drill Bit, 1864–1931](https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/artifact/193496), The Henry Ford - [The inventor Wilhelm Emil Fein](https://fein.com/en/fein/company/history/), C. & E. Fein GmbH - [Handbohrmaschine: replica of the first electric hand drill, C. & E. Fein, 1895](https://westfalen.museum-digital.de/object/3056), DASA Arbeitswelt Ausstellung, Dortmund (museum-digital: westfalen) Fact-checked on 2026-10-19. --- The Last Codex · https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/drill/ · © The Last Codex. Texts, plates and figures: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.