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Inventor, educator, philanthropist businessman-his design for the first tilting pad thrust bearing, conceived 100 years ago, is still in use in hundreds of thousands of machines.
The tilting pad thrust bearing was first conceived and tested by Albert Kingsbury more than 100 years ago and eventually revolutionized thrust bearing design. It allowed a more than tenfold increase over existing design unit loads, with a simultaneous reduction in frictional forces of the same or greater magnitude. Essentially unchanged since its introduction, the design has been applied to hundreds of thousands of rotating machines with unparalleled success. The use of this bearing has added immeasurably to the life, reliability and economic performance of such machines for scores of years.
This article discusses briefly the status of bearings during Albert Kingsbury's time and how his revolutionary design of an oil -film thrust bearing came into being.
When Kingsbury was born in Morris, 111., in 1863, rolling element bearings had been in use for hundreds of years. Leonardo da Vinci had conceived of ball and roller bearings around 1500, and plain bearings (journal and thrust) had been in use since antiquity. Design of plain bearings was mostly empirical, and long life was an elusive goal. The chief concern for hundreds of years was to find a material or combination of materials that would reduce friction and wear.
Railroads had assumed an increasing role in economic life both in the United States and abroad. By 1880 nearly 100,000 miles of track existed in the United States, spurring renewed interest in journal bearing friction, wear and the role of lubrication.
GA Hirn in 1854 published the results of bearing friction tests using various lubricants and was the first to observe air lubrication. Petrov published in 1883 the results of tests in Russia on the friction in lubricated journal bearings. In 1885 R.H. Thurston published his book "Friction and Lost Work in Machinery and Millwork," which is widely credited with awakening interest in the economic cost of friction and wear.
The most important events regarding lubrication in this period, however, were the accidental discovery of full film lubrication by Beauchamp Tower in 1883 and the subsequent explanation of the results by Osborne Reynolds in a landmark 1886 paper. At the time...