Drilling Before Electricity
For most of history, holes were made by hand-turned tools: the bow drill, the brace and bit, and the breast drill with a crank. A worker supplied all the power. Industrial machine shops had drill presses driven by belts from a steam engine or water wheel, but these were fixed machines, and the work had to be brought to them.
The portable electric drill depended on one thing: a small, light electric motor. That became possible only once electricity was supplied to buildings and motors had shrunk enough to carry.
The 1889 Patent for a Rock Drill
An early patent often cited in this history was granted in 1889 to Arthur James Arnot and William Blanch Brain in Melbourne, Australia. Their machine was an electric drill intended for rock and mining use. It was heavy and was designed to be braced in position, not held in the hand, so it is better described as an electric drill than as a portable power tool. Some sources date the patent slightly differently, so treat precise dates as approximate.
The Handheld Drill of 1895
A drill small enough to carry is usually credited to Wilhelm Emil Fein, whose company in Stuttgart, Germany, produced an electric handheld drill in 1895. It was a metal housing around a motor, with a handle at the back and a breast plate that the worker leaned on to push the bit forward. It was far from the tool known today, and was used mainly by tradespeople in factories and workshops. Because several inventors were working on similar tools in these years, “first” is best read as “an early and well documented” one.
The Pistol Grip and Trigger
A major step toward the modern tool came in 1917, when S. Duncan Black and Alonzo Decker patented a drill with a pistol grip and a trigger switch. Holding the tool like a gun and controlling it with one finger made it possible to guide it with one hand and stop it instantly. The trigger design was later adopted widely across the industry, and variations of it are still found on almost every drill.
Trades and Factories
By the 1920s and 1930s, electric drills were being used in automobile factories, shipyards and construction. They sped up repetitive work such as drilling rivet holes in metal and boring holes for wiring or pipes through timber. A tool that could be carried to the job, rather than the job being carried to the tool, reduced the labor in many trades, though it did not remove the need for skill. Drills also relied on electrical wiring in buildings, so they spread more slowly in places that lacked it.
Home Workshops
After the Second World War, in the United States and some other countries, a growing interest in do-it-yourself work helped the market for home tools. Manufacturers sold smaller drills, often with accessory kits that added sanding discs, grinding wheels or a stand to turn the drill into a small drill press. Lighter housings, double insulation (which allowed removal of the earth wire from many designs) and improved chucks made the tools safer and easier to use. Features such as variable speed, reversing and, later, hammer action for masonry were added over the decades.
Cordless Drills
The motor in a drill is a small relative of the industrial machines, but its power source changed. Rechargeable batteries made cordless drills possible. A cordless drill was introduced by Black & Decker in 1961, and the use of battery-powered tools in the space program in the 1960s is often mentioned, although the tools’ commercial development was largely independent of it.
Early cordless drills used nickel-cadmium cells, which were heavy, had limited capacity and needed hours to recharge. In the 2000s lithium-ion batteries began to replace them, giving more run time for less weight and eliminating much of the memory effect of earlier types. Combined with brushless motors, which use electronic switching instead of carbon brushes, they allowed cordless drills to match many corded models for everyday jobs.
What Changed Over Time
- Power: from heavy mains-fed machines, to compact corded drills, to battery-powered tools.
- Control: from a fixed single speed and breast plate to a trigger with variable speed and adjustable clutch.
- Use: from factory and mining equipment to a standard item in homes.
A Note on Credit
Most histories of power tools mention several names, and company histories tend to emphasize their own roles. The key milestones, namely the 1889 rock drill, the 1895 portable German drill, the 1917 pistol-grip design and the 1961 cordless drill, are widely repeated, but exact dates and claims of “firsts” vary between sources.