The Rock Eater - Exploring Energy

Exploring Energy News, August 2016, Page 5
Remember When
A look back at the nation’s oil & gas industry.
The nation’s, as well as Oklahoma’s, oil and gas industry is rich in history. As part of a new partnership with the American Oil & Gas
Historical Society (AOGHS), Exploring Energy will bring you energy stories from the past in each publication. Also catch “Remember When Wednesday” each
fourth Wednesday of the month with AOGHS Executive Director Bruce Wells joining the discussion on KECO 96.5’s Exploring Energy show from 8 to 9 a.m.
and on 102.3 KWDQ, sponsored by Big Chief Plant Services. For more articles, photos and features, or to support AOGHS, visit www.aoghs.org.
The Rock Eater
BY BRUCE WELLS
American Oil and Gas
Historical Society Director
“Fishtail” drill bits became
obsolete in 1909 when Howard
Hughes Sr. patented the dualcone roller bit.
By pulverizing hard rock, a bit
with two rotating cones brought
faster and deeper rotary drilling
– transforming the petroleum industry worldwide.
History notes many men who
were trying to improve bit technologies at the time, but Hughes
and business partner Walter
B. Sharp made it happen. Just
months before being awarded
the patent on August 10, 1909,
they established Sharp-Hughes
Tool Company in Houston.
After several years of experiments, Hughes and Sharp
introduced the novel drill bit
suited for deep boring through
medium and hard rock, according to the American Society of
Mechanical Engineers (ASME).
“Until then, the rudimentary
‘fishtail’ bit limited drillers to
reservoirs near the surface,”
noted ASME. Traditional rotary
bits were also useless for penetrating hard rock.
“Instead of scraping the rock,
as does the fishtail bit, the
Hughes bit, with its two conical cutters, took a different engineering approach,” explained
ASME in August 2009 - when
designating it as an Historic
Mechanical Engineering Landmark.
“By chipping, crushing, and
powdering hard rock formations,
the Hughes two-cone drill bit
could reach vast amounts of oil
in reservoirs thousands of feet
below the surface,” ASME said.
Biographers note that about
the time Sharp and Hughes were
developing their bit, Hughes had
a chance meeting in Louisiana
with another inventor trying to
improve drilling technology.
Hughes ran into Granville A.
Humason in a Shreveport bar
one evening in 1908. Humason had tried unsuccessfully to
sell his bit design to drillers. He
showed Hughes a wooden model made with spools.
Humason, who said his idea
came to him one morning when
grinding coffee, described meeting Hughes during a 1951 interview now in the collection of
the University of Texas Briscoe
Center for American History.
In the center’s oral history recording, Humason says Hughes
“bought my idea and paid me
$150 for the idea, and I stood in
the bar with the oil boys, and I
spent about $50 in the bar.”
While waiting for approval of
the patent in 1909, Hughes and
Sharp had a machine shop manufacture a prototype bit to test in
the field. Their secret drilling experiment took place near Houston. In June the partners loaded
their newly cast steel bit on a
horse-drawn wagon and took
it to the Goose Creek oilfield,
according to historian Donald
Barlett.
After stopping at an oil
well that had defied conventional drills, the men ordered
field hands away and secretly brought out the bit and
attached it to the rotary rig’s
pipe stem. For the next 11
hours, the bit bored through
14 feet of solid rock, “a feat
so miraculous for the time
that drillers dubbed the
mysterious device the “rock
eater.”
Production models of the
Sharp-Hughes Tool Company coned bit became a
crucial (and exclusively patented) tool for drilling deep-
er wells, beginning in Texas
and then around the world.
The foundations of the
Hughes fortune had been
laid, noted Barlett in a 1979
book. “Exactly what role, if
any, Humanson’s spools may
have played in the final design of the rock bit is impossible to determine today.”
When Walter Sharp died in
1912, Hughes bought the rest
of the company, changing the
name to Hughes Tool Company. Hughes died in 1924 at
age 54 of a heart attack in his
company’s Houston offices.
With the money earned
Revolving cones drilled “by chipping, crushing and
powdering hard rock formations.” Photo courtesy
American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
from the drill bit patent,
19-year-old Howard Hughes
Jr. further expanded the
oilfield fortune while making movies, setting aviation
records and helping build
much of Las Vegas. Hughes
Tool engineers invent the tricone bit in 1933.
Drill bits today rely on
the design principles introduced by the 1909 Hughes
patent - one of the greatest
inventions of the petroleum
industry.
Please give to the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. Visit www.aoghs.org.
The rotating cone bits drilled faster and deeper than
“fishtail” rotary bits. Photo courtesy U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office.
Sharp-Hughes Tool Company manufactured its new drill bits in Houston.
Circa 1915 photo courtesy Houston Public Library.
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