In 1849, Jonathan J. Couch had patented the world’s first percussion rock drill. The drill steel passed through a piston. The steel was launched by steam like a lance, seized in a gripper box on the recoil when the engine valve released the driving pressure, and rotated after every stroke. It worked on granite blocks, but was not commercially successful.

Couch’s former assistant, Joseph Fowle, patented a variation of this drill in 1851, in which the steel was mounted directly to the drill’s operating piston. It promised to be more successful than the Couch design, but was doomed by lack of financial backing.

Steam-engine builder Charles R. Burleigh, with aid from S.F. Gates and one W. Brooks, patented in 1866 an improvement on the ideas of Couch, Haupt, and Harsen. Their pneumatic tool could drill 3.3 inches of 1.75-inch-diameter hole per minute, and the Hoosac Tunnel Commission ordered 40 of them. Weighing more than 200 pounds each, they were gang-mounted on early versions of drill jumbos. Although productive, they quickly pounded themselves to pieces; a quarter of them were down for repairs at any given time.

Burleigh went back to the drawing board and incorporated Fowle’s concept of attaching the steel to the piston rod and Harsen’s means of rotating the piston and steel as a unit. But the major breakthrough was modifying the drill’s exhaust so that the discharged air cushioned the recoil, greatly reducing the pummeling the drill took from the blows.

The redesigned drill was tested successfully on Nov. 1, 1866, and deployed shortly thereafter. Performance and reliability were
greatly improved, and maintenance was far
less expensive. The only real problem was
their voracious appetite for drill steel; they
went through 3 tons a month, and blacksmiths were kept busy sharpening the steel while it lasted.

The introduction of the Burleigh drill into the Hoosac Tunnel marked the beginning of modern tunneling. This same drill was used at the Becket Quarries, and to build the Huckleberry Trolley Line.

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