Historical Development Of Bearings

The early form of linear motion bearings was to place a row of wooden rods under a row of pry plates. Modern linear motion bearings use the same working principle, but sometimes balls are used instead of rollers. The simplest type of rotary bearing is a sleeve bearing, which is simply a sleeve sandwiched between the wheel and axle. This design was later replaced by rolling bearings, which replaced the original liner with many cylindrical rollers, each rolling element acting like a separate wheel.
An example of an early ball bearing was discovered on an ancient Roman ship built in 40 BC at Lake Nami in Italy: a wooden ball bearing was used to support a rotating tabletop. It is said that Leonardo da Vinci described a type of ball bearing around 1500. One of the various immature factors of ball bearings is that they may collide with each other, causing additional friction. But this phenomenon can be prevented by placing the balls in small cages one by one. In the 17th century, Galileo gave the earliest description of "cage mounted ball" ball bearings. At the end of the 17th century, C. Warlow from England designed and manufactured ball bearings, which were installed on mail cars for trial use, and P. Worth from England obtained a patent for ball bearings. The earliest practical rolling bearing with a cage was invented by watchmaker John Harrison in 1760 to make an H3 hour meter. At the end of the 18th century, H.R. Hertz from Germany published a paper on contact stress in ball bearings. On the basis of Hertz's achievements, R. Strerbeck from Germany and A. Palmgren from Sweden conducted extensive experiments, contributing to the development of design theory and fatigue life calculation for rolling bearings. Subsequently, N.P. Petrov of Russia applied Newton's viscosity law to calculate bearing friction. The first patent for the ball groove was obtained by Philip Vaughn of Carson in 1794.
In 1883, Friedrich Fisher proposed the use of suitable production machines to grind steel balls of the same size and accurate roundness, laying the foundation of the bearing industry. O. Reynolds from the UK conducted a mathematical analysis of Thor's discovery and derived the Reynolds equation, laying the foundation for the theory of hydrodynamic lubrication.