Howard R. Hughes Sr.

Howard Robard Hughes Sr. was born on September 9, 1869, in Lancaster, Missouri, the son of Jean Amelia (née Summerlin; 1842–1928) and Judge Felix Turner Hughes (1837–1926). Hughes's older sister Greta, better known by her stage name Jeanne Greta, was a grand opera and concert singer. His younger brother, Rupert Hughes, was a famed novelist and screenwriter. Another brother, Felix Jr., was a baritone opera singer. Hughes was a classic entrepreneur, trying and failing at many things before eventually finding success.

After spending his childhood and early adulthood in Keokuk, Iowa; he lived in various places such as New York City, where he was a member of the Harvard Club; Denver; Joplin, Missouri; and Beaumont, Texas, prior to finally settling in Houston; where his son Howard Jr. was born.

Hughes Sr. was educated at Missouri Military Academy, in Mexico, Missouri. He then entered Harvard University in 1893, dropping out the next year.

After leaving Harvard in '94, I found myself in the Law School of the Iowa State University. It was my father's wish that I succeed him in his practice. Too impatient to await the course of graduation, I passed the examination before the Supreme Court of Iowa and began the practice of law. I soon found the law a too-exacting mistress for a man of my talent, and I quit her between dark and dawn, and have never since been back. I decided to search for my fortune under the surface of the earth.

Hughes Sr. married Allene Stone Gano, on June 24, 1904, in Dallas County, Texas, and engaged in various mining business endeavors before capitalizing on the Spindletop oil discovery in Texas, as a result of which he began devoting his full time to the oil business. In 1906, Hughes began experiments of ways to replace the state of the art technology at that time, the fishtail bit. (See image)

In 1908, he and Walter Benona Sharp, his business partner, built a two-cone drill bit model using wood. On November 20, 1908, he filed the basic patents for the Sharp-Hughes Rock Bit, and on August 10, 1909, was granted U.S. patent 930,758 and U.S. patent 930,759 for this rock drill. Hughes's two-cone rotary drill bit, nicknamed "rock eater", penetrated medium and hard rock with ten times the speed of any former bit, and its development revolutionized oil well drilling.

It is unlikely that he actually invented the two-cone roller bit, but his legal experience helped him in understanding that its patents were important for capitalizing on the invention. According to the PBS show History Detectives, several other people and companies had produced similar drill bits years earlier. In its initial tests at Goose Creek Oil Field in 1909 where the first offshore drilling for oil in Texas was occurring in Harris County, 21 mi (34 km) southeast of Houston on Galveston Bay, the Sharp-Hughes Rock Bit penetrated in 11 hours 14 ft (4.3 m) of hard rock which no previous equipment had been able to penetrate at all.

During WWI, he invented a tunnel boring machine for soldiers to create tunnels from their trenches.

He co-founded the Sharp-Hughes Tool Company with Walter Benona Sharp in 1909, and after Sharp's death in 1912, took over management. Hughes began purchasing the Sharp stock immediately and by 1918 had acquired full ownership of the company. The essential assets of Hughes Tool Company, as it was renamed, were August 10, 1909, patents for his dual-cone rotary drill bit. The fees for licensing this technology were the basis of Hughes Tool's revenues, and by 1914 the dual-cone roller bit was used in eleven U.S. states and in thirteen foreign countries. Hughes himself whimsically remarked that one of his "fond plans" was to "drill the deepest well in the world", comparing his quest to the Earth's center to Amundsen's South Pole expedition and Robert Peary's North Pole expeditions.