The results astounded him. He thought he must have made a mistake in his calculations and went over them again. But no. The figures were correct. Was he dreaming?
His father, who had been looking over his shoulder, was equally startled.
“Why, Tom!” he exclaimed, “do you realize what that means? That’s three times as much as you could have got with the ordinary drill.”
“I know,” said Tom, in a voice that he tried to keep calm. “I thought I must have miscalculated. Do you see any error in the figures?”
“None at all,” was the answer. “They’re perfectly correct. But it seems almost beyond belief.”
“Well,” said Tom, “one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and one test doesn’t prove that others will be just like it. Perhaps the soil was lighter and easier to penetrate than it really seems. The real test will come when we strike rock.”
They struck rock that afternoon, and the way the drill ground and scrunched its way through it was music to Tom’s ears. It ate its way with surprising rapidity, which was the more remarkable because the specimens brought up showed it to be of a remarkably hard quality. Here again the same comparative gain was made over the ordinary rate of rock penetration.
Still Tom refused to be rushed off his feet, and the work went on for two days more, days of steadily decreasing doubt, days of steadily increasing jubilation.
At the end of the third day, Tom knew that beyond the peradventure of a doubt he had “struck it.” He would have been delighted if his new drill had proved to be able to do half as much again as the one commonly in use. He would have been astounded had it proved to be able to do twice as much.
But the result had far outrun his wildest expectations. The principle that he had embodied in his new drill had trebled its effectiveness. He had hit on something that was destined to revolutionize the oil industry.