Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt

by Eugene S. Ferguson

Figure 30.—Franz Reuleaux (1829-1905). His Theoretische Kinematik, published in 1875, provided the basis for modern kinematic analysis. Photo courtesy Deutsches Museum, Munich.

Acting upon Ampère's clear exposition of the province of kinematics and excluding, as Ampère had done, the consideration of forces, an Englishman, Robert Willis, made the next giant stride forward in the analysis of mechanisms. Willis was 37 years old in 1837 when he was appointed professor of natural and experimental philosophy at Cambridge. In the same year Professor Willis—a man of prodigious energy and industry and an authority on archeology and architectural history as well as mechanisms—read his important paper "On the Teeth of Wheels" before the Institution of Civil Engineers[[70] and commenced at Cambridge his lectures on kinematics of mechanisms that culminated in his 1841 book Principles of Mechanism.[71]

[ [70] Robert Willis, "On the Teeth of Wheels," Transactions of the Institution of Civil Engineers of London, 1838, vol. 2, pp. 89-112.

[ [71] Willis, op. cit. (footnote 21). Through the kindness of its owner (Mr. Warren G. Ogden of North Andover, Massachusetts), I have had access to Willis' own copy of his 1841 edition of Principles of Mechanism. The book is interleaved, and it contains notes made by Willis from time to time until at least 1870, when the second edition was issued. Corrections, emendations, notations of some of his sources (for example, the De Voglie linkage mentioned in footnote 35 above), notes to himself to "examine the general case" and "examine the modern forms" of straight-line devices are interspersed with references to authors that had borrowed from his work without acknowledgment. Of one author Willis writes an indignant "He ignores my work."

It seemed clear to Willis that the problem of devising a mechanism for a given purpose ought to be attacked systematically, perhaps mathematically, in order to determine "all the forms and arrangements that are applicable to the desired purpose," from which the designer might select the simplest or most suitable combination. "At present," he wrote, "questions of this kind can only be solved by that species of intuition which long familiarity with a subject usually confers upon experienced persons, but which they are totally unable to communicate to others."

In analyzing the process by which a machine was designed, Willis observed: "When the mind of a mechanician is occupied with the contrivance of a machine, he must wait until, in the midst of his meditations, some happy combination presents itself to his mind which may answer his purpose." He ventured the opinion that at this stage of the design process "the motions of the machine are the principal subject of contemplation, rather than the forces applied to it, or the work it has to do." Therefore he was prepared to adopt without reservation Ampère's view of kinematics, and, if possible, to make the science useful to engineers by stating principles that could be applied without having to fit the problem at hand into the framework of the systems of classification and description that had gone before. He appraised the "celebrated system" of Lanz and Bétancourt as "a merely popular arrangement, notwithstanding the apparently scientific simplicity of the scheme." He rejected this scheme because "no attempt is made to subject the motions to calculation, or to reduce these laws to general formulas, for which indeed the system is totally unfitted."

Borgnis had done a better job, Willis thought, in actually describing machinery, with his "orders" based upon the functions of machine elements or mechanisms within the machine, but again there was no means suggested by which the kinematics of mechanisms could be systematically investigated.

Although Willis commenced his treatise with yet another "synoptical table of the elementary combinations of pure mechanism," his view shifted quickly from description to analysis. He was consistent in his pursuit of analytical methods for "pure mechanism," eschewing any excursions into the realm of forces and absolute velocities. He grasped the important concept of relative displacements of machine elements, and based his treatment upon "the proportions and relations between the velocities and directions of the pieces, and not upon their actual and separate motions."[72]

[ [72] Ibid., pp. iv, x-xii, xxi, 15.

That he did not succeed in developing the "formulas" that would enable the student to determine "all the forms and arrangements that are applicable to the desired purpose"—that he did not present a rational approach to synthesis—is not to be wondered at. Well over a century later we still are nibbling at the fringes of the problem. Willis did, nonetheless, give the thoughtful reader a glimpse of the most powerful tool for kinematic synthesis that has yet been devised; namely, kinematic analysis, in which the argument is confined to the relative displacements of points on links of a mechanism, and through which the designer may grasp the nature of the means at his disposal for the solution of any particular problem.