Few technologies achieve widespread manufacturing acceptance in their original form. Most require some sort of modification before they begin to be regularly used on an assembly line. A good example is cordless power tools, which didn’t become commonplace in manufacturing plants until the mid-1990s, despite being first developed more than 35 years earlier.
In 1961, Black & Decker Corp. introduced the first cordless electric drill, powered by a nickel-cadmium battery. A few years later, the company contracted with Martin Marietta Corp. to design tools for NASA, including a zero-impact wrench for the Gemini project that turns bolts without spinning the astronaut. Black & Decker also designed a cordless rotary hammer drill for the Apollo 15 moon mission in 1971.