Slippery

I took my Chevy to the local lube center yesterday for its second oil change. It took 20 minutes. For me it would have been a day’s project. I’m not a competent grease monkey though I admire anyone who is. I’m fine performing the monkeyshines of rough-and-ready carpentry: rebuilding my exterior wooden steps, reroofing sheds, replacing a basement window, and so on. When it comes to maintaining or repairing machinery however, I’m aware that anything I do will most likely put someone else to the trouble of undoing, so even for simple things I hire a professional from the start.

The notion of lubricating sticky moving parts is apparently an intuitive one since it dates back to prehistory and the earliest and simplest machines. Not until the time of Leonardo de Vinci did the underlying science of friction coefficients begin to be formalized, but ancient mechanics and engineers learned by trial and error what worked and what didn’t. The wooden axles of chariots and wagons, for example, quite quickly would char or even seize up the wheels without some slippery intermediary between wood and wood. Not even the shift to metal parts entirely solved the problem. In the third millennium BCE, Sumerians and Egyptians opted for leather loops greased with animal fat when mounting wheels. One chariot from an Egyptian tomb used a mix of fat, lime, and soap. Bitumen also sometimes was used but in the absence of refining this kind of raw petroleum varied a lot in viscosity and quality. The ancient Chinese used similar methods but also frequently opted for vegetable oil blended with lead.
 
In the West, animal fat continued to be the preferred lubricant for everything from wheels to ballistae to man-powered cranes throughout the Classical Era. New technologies did slowly get adopted however. In 330 BCE Diades, one of Alexander’s military engineers, developed roller bearings for battering rams. Bearings soon found their way into civilian uses in mills and potters’ wheels. The roller and ball bearings needed lubrication too, of course, and bitumen sometimes proved suitable for them.
 
The next big change came in the early years of industrialization in the 18^th century. New mechanisms – steam power in particular – were built to tighter tolerances and needed better lubricants. The industrial revolution would not have been possible without them. Whale oil was the solution but there were limits to the supply. The breakthrough came in 1859 when William Drake struck oil in Titusville Pennsylvania. Within a few years fractioning and refining of petroleum became a major industry. Synthetic oils from coal and other sources were invented in 1877 by Charles Friedel and James Crafts.
 
Today’s machinery uses up much less lubricant than earlier models. When I was a kid as long ago as the 1950s, a road trip from NJ to Florida required an oil change and lube before the return trip. In the 1960s and ‘70s I checked the oil on every vehicle my parents (or I) owned at least once a week and frequently had to add a quart. Nowadays cars are scheduled to go 6000 miles between changes – and that schedule is a conservative one. Out of habit I still check the oil levels from time to time, but I haven’t had to add oil to one of my vehicles between regular changes for 15 years. Besides, the information centers of my car and truck now would bray at me were the oil level to drop.
 
The oil change remains indispensable to keeping one’s vehicle roadworthy. If only preventive maintenance of my own body’s machinery were so easy and reasonably priced.
 

Jeff Beck – Grease Monkey