The Contribution of a Physicist to Tribology

WHILST Professor Bowden was on a visit to Australia in the second half of 1939, World War II broke out and he was asked by the Australian Government (C.S.I.R.O.) to set up a laboratory to deal with friction, lubrication and bearing problems of relevance to the Australian War Effort. For some time we had been concerned with the choice of a suitable title for the laboratory and when Professor Bowden returned to England in 1945 I suggested to his successor (the late Dr. Stewart Bastow) that we adopt the name of “Tribo‐physics”. We considered this to be not only a legitimate Greek compound word, and therefore of prestigious import; it also served the purpose of mystifying our sponsors so that all sorts of research activities could be undertaken in the course of our more general frictional investigations.