Jackhammer (Pneumatics is the power of compressed air)

Jackhammer, use exactly the same technology every time you ride on a bicycle or travel by
car. The rubber tires that carry you smoothly down the road are inflated with air, so the force
of your weight pushing down is exactly balanced by the pressure of the air pushing you
upward. Tires are an example of pneumatic technology, which means they use the force of air
pressure. (You may have heard of a similar technology called hydraulics that uses the force of
liquid pressure.)
For better understanding
You can't see air, but it's a surprising thing. It's a mixture of gases, mostly nitrogen and
oxygen, with its molecules constantly zooming back and forth like angry bees. When air is
trapped in a container, such as a bicycle tire, molecules of gas are repeatedly crashing into the
rubber walls and bouncing back again. Each time one of these collisions happens, the
molecules give a tiny push to the rubber. With millions of collisions happening all the time,
the air exerts quite a pressure (defined as the force acting per unit of area) on the rubber—
and that's what keeps the tire inflated. (The hotter the air is, the faster the gas molecules
move, the more energetically they collide, and the more pressure they exert. That's why tires
inflate more on hot days and after a long car journey.
You might have seen pneumatics in action elsewhere. Blowpipes are another good example.
When those angry savages from your comic books blow poisoned darts at their enemies,
they're using air pressure to force a missile down a tube at high speed. In olden days, big
department stores used pneumatic transport tubes to send money or messages rapidly from
one floor to another.
Steam engines use pneumatics too; instead of air, they use high-temperature, high-pressure
water vapor (steam) to push pistons back and forth and turn wheels at high speed. Vacuum
cleaners, which use suction to remove dirt from soft furnishings, use the same principle in
reverse—sucking air in rather than blowing it out.)

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Inside a jackhammer

The first time you saw someone digging a hole in the road with a tool like this, you probably
thought the equipment was electric or powered by a diesel engine, right? In fact, the
only energy involved in making a jackhammer pound up and down is supplied from an air
hose. The hose, which has to be made of especially thick plastic, carries high-pressure air
(typically 10 times higher pressure than the air around us) from a separate air-compressor unit
powered by a diesel engine.

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The air compressor is a bit like a giant bicycle pump that never stops blowing air. When the
worker presses down on the handle, air pumps from the compressor into the jackhammer
through a valve on one side. Inside the hammer, there's a circuit of air tubes, a heavy
piledriver, and a drill bit at the bottom. First, the high-pressure air flows one way round the
circuit, forcing the pile-driver down so it pounds into the drill bit, smashing it into the
ground. A valve inside the tube network then flips over, causing the air to circulate in the
opposite direction. Now the pile-driver moves back upward, so the drill bit relaxes from the
ground. A short time later, the valve flips over again and the whole process repeats. The
upshot is that the pile-driver smashes down on the drill bit over 25 times each second, so the
drill pounds up and down in the ground around 1500 times a minute.
Jackhammers, and the air compressors that power them, come in all different shapes and
sizes. The drill bits on the end are interchangeable too. There are wide chisels, narrow
chisels, and tools called moil points for fine work. A skilled drill operator can loosen chunks
of road in just 10-20 seconds, making light work of what our ancestors—with their antler
picks—would have found truly backbreaking work!

Who invented the jackhammer?

Although there are hundreds of patents for jackhammers and pneumatic tools, the earliest
appears to have been filed by Charles Brady King in 1894.

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King's design is a more elaborate version of the one I've sketched out in my animation up
above, but essentially works the same way with a reciprocating (back-and-forth) valve
making air move first one way and then another, moving a piston up and down, and bashing a
drill bit repeatedly into the ground. I've colored the valve in blue and, in this design, it shifts
from side to side, changing the way air flows between the inlet ports (colored yellow) and
outlet ports (colored brown).
How does it work? When the valve is in the position shown here, air enters through the thick
yellow hose at the top and follows the thinner paths shown in yellow, pushing the piston (red)
downward and smashing the hammer (green and gray) into the ground.
As the piston moves down, air flows back up through one of the pipes and push the blue
valve over to the right, so the air now follows the brown paths and exits.
Here's a small selection of three early jackhammers on record at the US Patent and
Trademark Office, including King's. You can find many more examples if you search for
"pneumatic drill" or "jackhammer" at the USPTO website: