RUBBING AND SCRUBBING

The ''rubbing and scrubbing department'' was how David Tabor's frictio n, lubrication and wear laboratory was described by certain uncharitab le colleagues at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, some 40 years ago. The tables have turned. Tribology, as Tabor named his di scipline (from the Greek tribes, meaning ''rubbing''), has become resp ectable-even positively modish-in physics departments worldwide. And T abor, having become the revered elder statesman of this flourishing fi eld, is often accorded a place in reference 1 of even the most hardcor e tribe-physics papers.(1) Although Tabor brought physics to tribology in the 1950s, the origins of the field lie in the engineering science s and stretch back more than 5000 years to the neolithic period. Dunca n Dowson, in his fascinating history of the subject,(2) describes an e arly use of bearings in door sockets in Assyrian villages before 4000 BC. Dowson's treatise also shows an ancient Egyptian tomb painting of the first recorded tribologist pouring a liquid toil, water, milk?-the archaeologists are uncertain) in front of a large statue as it is bei ng dragged over wooden planks by teams of slaves. This image has subse quently become a staple of tribology lectures and overview articles, a nd the temptation to include it here as figure 1 has been too hard to resist.(2,3)