The first ball bearings to win a race were on a bicycle in 1869
In August 1869 a Parisian bicycle mechanic named Jules Suriray patented a radial ball bearing. That November his bearings were fitted to the bike James Moore rode to victory in the Paris to Rouen race, the world's first bicycle road race.
A bearing restricts motion to the direction you want and cuts friction between moving parts. The simplest, a plain bearing, is just a shaft turning in a lubricated hole; ball and roller bearings replace sliding with rolling. A popular story holds that rollers came before wheels, with Egyptians hauling stones on tree trunks, but no archaeology supports it. Paintings in the tomb of Djehutihotep instead show massive blocks dragged on sledges over wetted sand. Wheels on plain bearings appeared between about 5000 and 3000 BC.
One of the oldest rolling bearings ever recovered is made of wooden balls and supported a rotating table on the Roman ships sunk in Lake Nemi, dated to 40 BC. Leonardo da Vinci sketched ball bearings into a helicopter design around 1500, the first known aerospace use. Loose balls rub against each other, so Galileo described holding each one in a cage, and the clockmaker John Harrison built the first practical caged-roller bearing in the mid-1740s for his H3 marine timekeeper. The Welsh ironmaster Philip Vaughan of Carmarthen took the first ball bearing patent in 1794.
Precision made an industry possible. In 1883 Friedrich Fischer, founder of FAG, devised a machine to grind balls of equal size and exact roundness, and his hometown, Schweinfurt, became a world centre of bearing production. Henry Timken, a carriage maker, patented the tapered roller bearing in 1898, and Sven Wingquist of SKF won a Swedish patent in 1907 for the self-aligning ball bearing. Erich Franke followed in 1934 with the wire race bearing, designed to be as slim as possible.
Early bearings were wood and then bronze; today they are made of steel, ceramic, sapphire, glass and plastics such as nylon and PTFE. They spin in dental drills at ultra high speeds, ride in Mars rovers, and float on air in coordinate-measuring machines.
Source: Bearing (mechanical)
