Leonardo da Vinci - the inventor of the ball bearing
29.04.2021

Leonardo da Vinci invented the ball bearing around the year 1500. He designed it to lower the friction between two plates that would be in contact in his other famous design for the Helicopter. The first known discovery of a ball bearing type device was found in the Roman Empire in the form of a simple rotating table with balls underneath, presumably to allow the people eating at the table to simply rotate the table to get to the food at the other side of the table. It wouldn’t be until 1792 that there was a patent filed for the “modern” ball bearing by the Englishman Philip Vaughn.

Ball bearings can be found in any machine that has rotary motion. They can be found in fans, electric моторс, engines, kitchen appliances, bicycles, automobiles and a million other machines. They are so important that the Royal Air Force regularly bombed German Ball Bearing Factories during World War 2 in an effort to try to stop the German War Machine.