After spending his childhood and early adulthood in Keokuk, Iowa; he lived in various places such as New York City, where he was a member of the Harvard Club; Denver; Joplin, Missouri; and Beaumont, Texas, prior to finally settling in Houston; where his son Howard Jr. was born.

(See image) In 1908, he and Walter Benona Sharp, his business partner, built a two-cone drill bit model using wood.

According to the PBS show History Detectives, several other people and companies had produced similar drill bits years earlier.

In its initial tests at Goose Creek Oil Field in 1909 where the first offshore drilling for oil in Texas was occurring in Harris County, 21 mi (34 km) southeast of Houston on Galveston Bay, the Sharp-Hughes Rock Bit penetrated in 11 hours 14 ft (4.3 m) of hard rock which no previous equipment had been able to penetrate at all.

The essential assets of Hughes Tool Company, as it was renamed, were August 10, 1909, patents for his dual-cone rotary drill bit.

The fees for licensing this technology were the basis of Hughes Tool's revenues, and by 1914 the dual-cone roller bit was used in eleven U.S. states and in thirteen foreign countries.

[6] Charles Kuldell Rudolph On January 14, 1924, Hughes Sr. died of a heart attack caused by an embolism at his company's offices on the fifth floor of the Humble Oil Building in Houston at the age of 54.

The Sharp-Hughes Rock Bit found virtually all the oil discovered during the initial years of rotary drilling, and Hughes Jr. became one of the wealthiest people in the world from its revenues.