The origin of the development of bearings

An early form of linear motion bearing was a row of wooden rods placed under a row of skids. Modern linear motion bearings use the same principle of operation, except that sometimes balls are used instead of rollers. The simplest type of rotary bearing was the bushing bearing, which was simply a bushing sandwiched between the wheel and the axle. This design was then replaced by the rolling bearing, which is a bearing that replaces the original bushing with a number of cylindrical rollers, each of which acts like a separate wheel.

An early example of a ball bearing was found on an ancient Roman ship constructed in 40 B.C. found in Lake Nemi, Italy: a wooden ball bearing was used to support a rotating tabletop. Leonardo da Vinci is said to have described a ball bearing around 1500. Among the various unsophisticated elements of ball bearings is the fact that the balls can collide with each other, causing additional friction. This can be prevented by placing the balls in a small cage, and Galileo's earliest description of the "caged ball" ball bearing was given in the 17th century. At the end of the 17th century, C. Valor of England designed and manufactured ball bearings, which were mounted on mail carriages and tried out, and P. Worth of England patented the ball bearing. The first practical rolling bearing with a cage was invented by watchmaker John Harrison in 1760 for the H3 chronograph. At the end of the 18th century, H.R. Hertz of Germany published a paper on contact stresses in ball bearings. On the basis of Hertz's achievement, R. Streibeck of Germany, A. Palmgren of Sweden and others carried out a large number of tests and contributed to the development of the design theory and fatigue life calculation of rolling bearings. Subsequently, N.P. Petrov of Russia applied Newton's law of viscosity to calculate bearing friction. The first patent on ball grooves was granted to Philip Vaughan of Carmarthen in 1794.

In 1883, Friedrich Fischer laid the foundations of the bearing industry with his proposition of using suitable production machines to grind steel balls of the same size and exact roundness. O. Reynolds of England mathematically analyzed Thor's discovery and derived the Reynolds equation, which henceforth laid the foundation for the theory of fluid dynamic pressure lubrication.