The Contribution of a Physicist to Tribology

Abstract

WHILST Professor Bowden was on a visit to Australia in the second half of 1939, World War II broke out and he was asked by the Australian Government (C.S.I.R.O.) to set up a laboratory to deal with friction, lubrication and bearing problems of relevance to the Australian War Effort. For some time we had been concerned with the choice of a suitable title for the laboratory and when Professor Bowden returned to England in 1945 I suggested to his successor (the late Dr. Stewart Bastow) that we adopt the name of “Tribo‐physics”. We considered this to be not only a legitimate Greek compound word, and therefore of prestigious import; it also served the purpose of mystifying our sponsors so that all sorts of research activities could be undertaken in the course of our more general frictional investigations.

Citation

TABOR, D. (1967), "The Contribution of a Physicist to Tribology", Industrial Lubrication and Tribology, Vol. 19 No. 7, pp. 274-275. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb052835