A History of Lubricants
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A History of Lubricants In a civilization that dépends on machines, materials that lubricate moving parts are absolutely essential. A "lubricant" is any substance placed between surfaces to decrease friction and wear, though lubricants can also act as codants, cleansing agents, electrical insulators, and rust préventives. Primitive man probably noticed how much easier it was to haul logs that had been srripped of bark because of the lubrication provided by sap oozing from the wood. Other prehistoric lubricants were mud or crushed reeds placed under dragged sledges for hauling game or timbers and rocks for building construction. More extensive use of lubrication was required with the invention of the wheel and axle. The first carts were made with crude wooden axles and bearings. Eventually, people discovered that smearing a lump of animal fat on the dry and squeaking parts made the wheel run quietly and smoothly. However, without the scientific concept of friction, no one knew why. When iron and brass replaced wood as moving parts in machinery, crude lumps of animal fat proved to be inadéquate lubricants. The second génération of fatty and oily substances were derived from animal oils, vegetable oils, or a mixture of the two. Some of thèse lubricants—tallow, olive oil, castor oil, peanut oil, and râpe oil—are still used for specialized purposes. After about the 16th century, whale oil and porpoise oil came into wide use. W i t h the rise of the petroleum industry in the 19th cenrury, petroleum-based lubricants quickly dominated the field. Petroleum itself had been known long before this—since the ancient Assyrians and Egyptians, who used it for lighting and embalming. American Indians used crude petroleum medicinally. The American colonists who discovered petroleum while drilling for sait considered it a nuisance and poured it away as waste. One of the earliest références to crude oil used as a lubricant is from a cotton spinning mill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1845. The owner apparently tiied a sample of minerai oil obtained from a sait well drilled on the Allegheny River. Minerai oils, derived from crude petroleum, consist of a complex mixture of saturated and unsaturated aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbons. The Pittsburgh cotton-mill owner experimented with his minerai oil by mixing it with the sperm oil he had been using to
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lubricate his spindles. He found the lubricant blend to be much more satisfactory than the straight sperm oil and continued to use the new lubricant for 10 years, while keeping it a secret from his competitors. Fifteen years later, when Colonel Edwin L. Drake drilled the first acrual oil well, petroleum lubricants began replacing nonminerai materials throughout industry.
In a civilization that dépends on machines, materials that lubricate moving parts are absolutely essential. Petroleum lubricants, like their animal and vegetable oil predecessors, are liquids. Liquid lubricants hâve an advantage over semisolid lubricants (such as grease and animal fat) in that
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