Seed drill further refined by Jethro Tull in 1701 in the Agricultural Revolution. However, seed drills of this and successive types were both expensive and unreliable, as well as fragile. Seed drills would not come into widespread use in Europe until the mid to late 19th century, when manufacturing advances such as machine tools, die forging and metal stamping allowed large scale precision manufacturing of metal parts. Early drills were small enough to be pulled by a single horse, and many of these remained in use into the 1930s. The availability of steam, and later gasoline tractors, however, saw the development of
Drill hub that are turned to move the spindle and chuck vertically. A drill press is typically measured by its "swing", calculated as twice the distance from the center of the chuck to the closest edge of the column. Thus, a tool with 4" between chuck center and column edge is described as an 8" drill press. A drill press has a number of advantages over a hand-held drill: For most drill presses—especially those meant for woodworking or home use—speed change is achieved by manually moving a belt across a stepped pulley arrangement. Some drill presses add a third stepped pulley