It was approximately 2,600,000 years ago,the earliest known tools consisted of variously sized examples of the pebble tool, or chopper. The chopper is thought to be the first tool made and used by human beings.as the name suggets ,it was used mainly for chopping meat,cutting through the skin of the animals he hunted.

The chopper was the only tool used by humanity for almost 2,000,000 years, until the appearance of the hand axe, a superior version of the chopper. In this tool the entire surface of the rock was worked. Because both faces were chipped, the edge of the hand axe was considerably sharper than that of the earlier chopper.

It was about 110,000 years ago, that man evolved to become an excellent toolmaker, man used many different types of hand axes, as well as the first knives, and spears.Records say that the first modern man, appeared about 35,000 years ago and brought into existence new types of tools which made possible the manufacture of needles, hooks, and projectiles.

The most significant ,later innovation of the period was hafting, or the fitting of a handle to a tool. Knives without handles are merely awkward, but axes or hammers without them are almost impossible to use effectively.

The Neolithic Period began about 7000 BC, when the first ground and polished tools were made. The growth of ground tools

enabled Neolithic axe-wielders to clear forests for agriculture, fuel, and shelter.

Three thousand years later, however, the stone axes of the Neolithic Period began to give way to the first tools made from metal, usually beaten copper. Centuries later, people learned how to smelt copper and, and later, iron, and the use of metal tools spread throughout the world.

Modern hand tools were developed in the period after 1500 BC. They are now generally considered in the following classes:

# Percussive tools, which deliver blows (the axe, hammer,etc)

# Cutting, Drilling, and Aabrading tools (the knife, drill, saw,chisel,etc);

# The screw-based tools (screwdrivers and wrenches)

# Measuring tools (ruler, compass,etc)

# Accessory tools (vise, tongs,pliers,etc).

In 18th century, mankind developed steam engines and discovered how to drive tools mechanically. In particular, machine-driven tools became necessary to manufacture goods formerly produced by hand. Most common machine tools were designed by the middle of the 19th century. Today, scores of different machine tools are used in the workshops of home and industry. These are frequently classified into seven types:

The most fundamental of all seven is the lathe, which is employed in a vast number of turning, facing, and drilling operations.

Shapers and planers use single-point tools to machine flat surfaces. Shapers move the cutting tool back and forth over the material, peeling away the surface, whereas planers have stationary tools, and the surface is moved to encounter them.

Power drills are usually known as drill presses and have a twist drill that cuts holes in metal and other substances. They can also be used for many of the countersinking, boring, tapping, and other purposes for which lathes are frequently used.

Milling machines have rotating cutting surfaces that abrade substances with which they come into contact. In standard milling machines, a sliding table with a workpiece on top is pushed against the whirling cutter.

Grinding machines function in a similar manner, except that the cutter is replaced by a spinning abrasive disk called a grinding wheel . The most accurate of all machining processes, grinding can create metal surfaces within .0001 inch (.0025 centimetre) of the desired dimension.

Power saws frequently consist of long thin moving belts or chains lined with teeth, as in band saws or chain saws.

Presses are used to ram material against a hard surface; the surface often consists of a die, and the action of the press is to stamp out metal or plastic beaten into the shape of the die.

Some materials and metal alloys are too hard or too brittle to be machined by standard tools, for these materials, several nonconventional methods have been devised. In electron- or ion-beam machining, a stream of highly energized electrons or ions is directed against the workpiece. In electrical-discharge and electrochemical machining, an electrical charge passing through a liquid medium across a tiny gap dissolves material from the workpiece. In ultrasonic machining a vibrating tool causes a liquid abrasive medium to remove material. Other nonconventional methods are laser, plasma-arc, chemical, photochemical, and water-jet machining.

Automatic machine tools can produce parts repetitively without human assistance. Computer control creates fully automatic machine-tool systems by feeding the machines instructions that have been reduced to digital or numerical values.

The successful introduction of interchangeable parts and the development of machine tools, both in the 19th century, brought the modern machine shop into being. Then, as now, the independent machine shop was called a job shop, which meant that it had no product of its own but served large industrial facilities by fabricating tooling, machines, and machinepart replacements. Eventually, some machine shops began to specialize in tooling to the exclusion of other work.