Today’s dental instruments are highly effective and technology driven, but they were not always so. For instance the first dental drill began as a foot-powered adaptation in 1790. John Greenwood, who was the personal dentist to George Washington, fashioned it from his mother’s spinning wheel! Greenwood made some false teeth for Washington from ivory and used a foot pedal to operate the drill.
George Fellows Harrington came up with a clockwork dental drill in 1864, which was faster but extremely noisy. This was the first drill which ran on a motor.
The first modern dental drill was invented by John Borden in 1957. His model was a high-speed, air driven drill that took much less time to drill teeth than the earlier ones. Today’s drills run at far higher speeds and are much more efficient than previous models. A jet of cold water is used to keep them from getting too hot.
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