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Repeating Leonardo's 500-year-old experiments confirm that he was the first to propose the fundamental laws of friction.
ALL TRIBOLOGISTS ARE FAMILIAR WITH AMONTONS' BASIC LAWS OF FRICTION that he propounded at the end of the 18th Century. They underpin our use, both of the term friction coefficient and the notion that it is independent of the apparent contact area. However, the discovery of several caches of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks in the 1960s suggest that in fact he discovered the laws first. While he is perhaps best known for his art-his Mona Lisa is one of the world's most famous paintings-and as an inventor, he was also a remarkably talented scientific experimentalist. Pages from his Codex Arundel (a codex is a manuscript in book form) written in Italian between 1480 and 1518 clearly show what can only be tribological experiments (see Figure /). He concluded from these experiments that "The friction made by the same weight will be of equal resistance at the beginning of its movement...