The historical development of bearings

The early form of linear motion bearings was to place a row of wooden poles under a row of skid plates. Modern linear motion bearings use the same working principle, but sometimes use balls instead of rollers. The simplest rotary bearing is a bushing bearing, which is just a bush sandwiched between the wheel and the axle. This design was subsequently replaced by rolling bearings, which replaced the original bushings with many cylindrical rollers. Each rolling element was like a separate wheel.

An early example of a ball bearing was discovered on an ancient Roman ship built in 40 BC in Lake Nami, Italy: a wooden ball bearing was used to support a rotating tabletop. It is said that Leonardo da Vinci once described a ball bearing around 1500. Among the various immature factors of ball bearings, there is a very important point that collisions between the balls will cause additional friction. But this phenomenon can be prevented by putting the balls in small cages one by one. In the 17th century, Galileo made the earliest description of the "cage ball" ball bearing. At the end of the seventeenth century, British C. Wallo designed and manufactured ball bearings, and installed them on mail trucks for trial use, and British P. Worth obtained a patent for ball bearings. The first rolling bearing with a cage to be put into practical use was invented by watchmaker John Harrison in 1760 to make the H3 chronograph. At the end of the eighteenth century, German H.R. Hertz published a paper on the contact stress of ball bearings. On the basis of Hertz's achievements, R. Stribeck in Germany, A. Palmgren in Sweden and others have conducted a large number of experiments, which have contributed to the development of rolling bearing design theory and fatigue life calculation. Subsequently, Russia’s N.P. Petrov applied Newton’s law of viscosity to calculate bearing friction. The first patent on the ball groove was obtained by Philip Vaughan of Carmarthen in 1794.

In 1883, Friedrich Fisher proposed the use of suitable production machines to grind steel balls of the same size and accurate roundness, which laid the foundation for the bearing industry. British O. Reynolds conducted a mathematical analysis of Thor’s discovery and derived the Reynolds equation, thus laying the foundation for hydrodynamic lubrication theory.