The writer is a science commentator
In the early 1960s, just after Labour leader Harold Wilson rose to power on his promise of harnessing the “white heat of technology”, the British engineer-turned-steelworks boss and entrepreneur Peter Jost sensed his moment.
Jost, with a background in lubricants and a well-oiled contacts book stretching across industry, academia and politics, persuaded the government to commission a report into the kind of machinery failures afflicting steelworks all over Europe. The 1966 Jost report championed lubrication, unsurprisingly, but also laid the groundwork for a new discipline called tribology, the science and technology of how surfaces move against each other, creating friction and wear. Jost even consulted the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary before settling on the name, based on the Greek word tribo, meaning “to rub”.
Writ large, tribology is the discipline that literally keeps parts of the economy moving — and, like so much research that focuses on prevention, remains largely invisible. And yet, 60 years on, one of the report’s key messages remains relevant: that the unseen business of optimising surface interactions, such as tyre against asphalt, at an industrial scale can save vast amounts of energy and raise GDP.
“The irony is that tribology affects almost everything we use, yet most people have never heard the word,” says Daniele Dini, professor of tribology at Imperial College London, accurately describing my own experience of discovering the term last week in a Physics World essay. Without tribology, Dini adds, “machines would wear out rapidly, vehicles would consume much more fuel, manufacturing processes would be less efficient, and many medical devices would simply not function reliably”.
Substances like toothpaste, shaving cream and cosmetics are all triumphs of tribology, as is the action of swiping a phone. Our lives are filled with carefully calibrated surface contacts to ensure a suitable balance of grip, feel, resistance, texture and motion. Robert Wood, professor of surface engineering and tribology at the University of Southampton, describes toothpaste as “a carefully engineered tribological slurry”, designed to remove debris from teeth without stripping enamel or damaging gums.
More widely, Wood characterises tribology as “one of the enabling technologies that silently underpins industrial productivity” in sectors including wind and nuclear power generation, automotive, rail, aerospace, biomedical implants — including joint replacements — and food processing. It can comprise the study of ball bearings, lubricants, coatings and additives in an industrial factory; while oral tribology looks at the friction between food particles and tongue, palate and teeth, to ensure that ice cream tastes creamy.
Energy use is a vital consideration. Not all a car’s fuel, for example, is spent on going from A to B. Some is expended on overcoming the friction between tyre and road surface, some to counter aerodynamic losses, and some to make up for friction losses within the engine and transmission.
“Despite its huge economic impact, tribology remains less visible than fields such as AI, robotics, semiconductors or biotechnology,” Wood says. That could be because it cuts across existing disciplines, including materials science, chemistry and computing.
Tribology is a central concern in the path to net zero (Wood chairs a committee advising government on the relevant issues). Wind turbine gearboxes regularly fail before the end of their design life, sometimes because lubricant films on their moving parts are prone to shearing with changes in wind speed and direction. Scientists are also exploring the “triboelectric effect”, in which the rubbing of surfaces is used to generate electricity.
Future tribological goals include predicting and preventing wear, rather than measuring it after it happens, and the development of sustainable lubricants. Advances like graphene and materials that are smooth at the atomic scale are also raising hopes of “superlubricity”, where friction between moving parts drops to near zero. If scaled up, that would revolutionise energy efficiency.
It is all a long way from Jost and, before him, Leonardo da Vinci, who, according to forensic engineering professor and tribologist Sarah Hainsworth from Durham University, scribbled notes about friction in his 1493 Codex Forster. It is even further from the ancient Egyptians, who applied oil and fats to the sled runners used to move the stone blocks for building the pyramids.
Throughout history, it seems, the course of tribology can always run that little bit smoother.