Houston might trace its fortunes to an awful decision in a Shreveport, La., bar in 1908.

Inventor Granville Humason had a chance encounter with a wildcatter - a drifter who had been a reporter in Colorado, a miner in Oklahoma and Missouri, and a no-luck oil prospector in Texas. Humason showed the man his model for a new drill bit. The oilman was so enthused he bought the crude wooden spools for $150 - or more than $4,000, adjusted for inflation. Humason spent a third of the proceeds on his bar tab, treating a crew of roughnecks.

He walked away with a fistful of cash and maybe a hangover.

Howard Hughes Sr. came out with the future of Houston in his hands.

Humason recorded that story in 1953, on a tape now sitting in an Austin library. It may or may not be true. According to various histories, at least six other people did early work on their own versions of the invention that would turn Hughes into forebear of an oilfield equipment empire.

No matter who thought of it first, Hughes' technical savvy, impulsive streak, legal acumen and Harvard connections helped him win the race to the patent office, affording him exclusive rights to a perfected dual-cone rotary bit.

The innovation revolutionized oil exploration, opening vast untapped reservoirs and providing a glut of fuel for Henry Ford's new contraptions. From the beginning, Houston bucked and started on the whims of people like Hughes, impatient entrepreneurs who envisioned milk and honey by the sea and, arriving to find hot mud and mosquitoes, devised an invention to get their riches anyway.

When the wanderer from Iowa joined the oil crowd in Southeast Texas, he'd have $50,000 in the bank one year, then owe the bank $50,000 the next, his brother wrote. Today, his corporate descendant, Baker Hughes, thrives one year and puts off a multibillion-dollar merger the next under oil's same duplicitous promises. Jobs and housing markets follow, and so the city rises and falls on a path Hughes trod long before.

It would be a different tale without that one bit.

As a boy, Hughes Sr. loved tinkering with gadgets, according to "Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness," a biography of Hughes Jr. by Donald Barlett and James Steele. He took apart engines and put them back together. But he had a swashbuckling restlessness that earned him a delinquent's reputation in Keokuk, Iowa.

Hughes followed his father's footsteps in law, but couldn't stand more than a year at Harvard. He passed the bar exam and started practicing alongside his dad, but that, too, failed to take the edge off his wanderlust. As a zinc and lead miner, he learned about cable tools: heavy bits pounded into the earth under the weight of their own cables to hammer away at rock.

While wildcatting around northern Louisiana, Hughes and his partner, Walter Sharp, kept running into the same walls as everyone else. The equipment of the day, a rotating blade-like bit called a fishtail, scraped easily through soft earth, but ground to a nub against deeper rock formations. That geology kept trillions of barrels of oil out of reach.

Hughes' solution: twin cones, each with more than 100 cutting edges, that rolled against the rock while the weight of the rig pressed down from above. The cones ground and chipped, pulverizing the rock while fluids, pumped into the bore, carried the cuttings away.

Sharp and Hughes put their product to the test at Goose Creek, outside Houston. In the finest tradition of oil-field secrecy, they boxed it, hid it in a burlap sack and ordered everyone off the well site while they attached it to the drill pipe. Then they lowered it and called the crew back in. In 11 hours, it cut a 1,000-foot well in a field otherwise deemed hopeless, according to another Hughes Jr. biography, "The Untold Story," by Peter Harry Brown and Pat Broeske.

The brutal efficiency of the Hughes tool earned it the name Rock Eater. In a 1915 presentation to the American Institute of Mining Engineers, Hughes showed how his device achieved a 75 percent reduction in drilling costs per foot.

About three quarters of the oil that gushed out of Texas wells in that era touched a Hughes tool. The run on Southeast Texas exploded with the new technology, enriching Hughes and cementing Houston's position as an industrial metropolis.

The Sharp-Hughes Tool Co. began in a small building on Buffalo Bayou, at the present site of the University of Houston-Downtown. After Sharp died, the Hughes Tool Co. moved east of downtown, to Polk Street, where it grew into the largest manufacturing complex in Houston by World War I, according to Joe Pratt, an oil historian at UH. In 1993, it moved to the Woodlands.

Honest work suited Hughes well, as it turned out. He poured his antsy spirit into innovation, never resting on a patent, always looking for the next edge to serve the industry's drive for better, faster, cheaper wells. His 1934 patent for a tri-cone rotary bit essentially won him a monopoly for the next 17 years.

Every innovation brought challenges: how to keep metal moving parts lubricated at thousands of feet of depth and pressure, how to keep rock dust from gumming up the works, how to press hard steel and tungsten carbide tips into drill-head holes with a precision of one ten thousandth of an inch.

"You've got (the weight of) a railroad car sitting on top of that bit spinning at 150 revolutions per minute," said Scott Schmidt, Baker Hughes' vice president of drill bits. "The materials science that goes into it is amazing."

For many applications, diamond-tipped bits that essentially shave away the rock surface have taken the place of rotary cones. But a modern version of the dual cone is still used in some applications, Schmidt said.

At The Woodlands facility, Hughes' restless energy outlives even his eccentric son, whose movies and airplanes captured the world's attention but never would have existed without his father's fortune. Through constant innovation, Baker Hughes remains one of the top three global players in oil field services. It all rests on one invention at the bottom of the hole.

"Nothing happens without the drill bit," Schmidt said.