Everybody knows that oil wells and derricks go together. The tall derrick towers are needed to hoist drilling equipment in and out of the hole.
When men start to drill a well, they fasten a cutting tool, called a bit, to a piece of pipe which hangs upright in the derrick. Machinery turns the whole thing round and round, so that the bit grinds down into the earth. When one length of pipe, called a joint, has almost disappeared into the hole, men screw another joint onto the top of it. Now the engine turns the double-length pipe, and the bit digs down deeper.
Men, working on the floor and high up in the derrick, hoist more and more joints into position and screw them together as the bit goes on down. After a while, the bit gets dull. A new one must be put on. So, strong cables that run over wheels at the top of the derrick begin lifting the whole string of pipe out. Joint by joint, they unscrew the pipe and stack it out of the way. When the last joint comes up, men change the bit. Then back the pipe goes, joint after joint, into the hole.
Wells must often be drilled more than two miles deep before the bit breaks through into an underground reservoir of oil. That means that the string of drilling pipe must be two miles long. The machines that help to handle it are very strong, but on many rigs, men have to use their own muscles a great deal, too.
For deep drilling, the most modern rigs have a lot of fine new machinery. Automatic tongs take a tight grip on the drilling pipe when it is being unscrewed. Men used to work the tongs by hand. Mechanical hands
now keep the bottom joints from dropping back into the hole, and arms high up in the derrick do the job of stacking the pipe.
The skillful men who work with the pipes and the machinery call themselves roughnecks. The driller is the one who actually controls the drilling pipe. He never says he is digging a well. He says he is “making hole.”