THE BEAUCHAMP TOWER STORY Available to Purchase

BY way of introduction perhaps a word may be appropriate to explain how I got involved in this study. When I was writing a text book on lubrication I made a resolution never to quote any reference that I had not actually seen and read. When it came to the basic law of journal bearing friction, known as Petroff's law, I had the formidable task of going through his very lengthy works to fulfil my resolution. His classic 1883 paper is 209 pages long and the next one of 1886 has 438 pages plus 119 pages of tables, while the 1887 one contains a mere 121, all of them in Russian.