Jewish Invention Myths: The Tapered Roller Bearing
I must confess before I saw it Kathyrn Bernheimer’s list of alleged ‘Jewish Inventions’ (1) I had never heard of a ‘Tapered Roller Bearing’ but it turns out these are an important invention which enabled the axles of both carriages and more recently motorized vehicles to support axial and radial forces at the same time.
To be specific about the jewish claim: it is that a jewish inventor named Henry Timken ‘invented’ the tapered roller bearing in 1898. (2)
This however is simply not true.
Since despite Timken’s company almost being a monopoly of the taper roller bearing market by the 1920s via the company he founded – the ‘Timken Roller Bearing Axle Company’ – he only actually invented an improvement upon the tapered roller bearing. (3)
The truth is that John Lincoln Scott – a farmer from Wilmot, Indiana – invented the tapered roller bearing in 1895: three years before Timken and was awarded US patent 552008A in 1895 for it. (4)
Now where this gets interesting is when we note that Timken opened his own carriage building company in St. Louis in 1855 and became famous as well as rich through his inventions like the ‘Timken Buggy Spring’.
Now Wilmot, Indiana and St. Louis are only 5 days walk from one another and there is three years between the two patents (Scott’s and Timken’s) plus Timken happens to have been a noted carriage builder in St. Louis, which is the primary use of Scott’s 1895 patent. We also know Timken had moved back to St. Louis from San Diego in 1891 after retiring in 1887 and was back in business.
It isn’t too much of a stretch to suggest that there is a link between the two inventions so close to each other geographically and also close to each other in time as well as that link could well be that Scott tried to hawk his invention around the various carriagemakers – of which Timken was one if not the most famous – within a couple of days travel from where he lived.
Scott approached Timken and Timken either took a sample or understood what Scott had developed then promptly – presumably after telling Scott it was no good or some such - went away, made a few tweaks to Scott’s design and patented it himself as his own design and used that to create the ‘Timken Roller Bearing Axle Company’ and massively increased his already large existing fortune, while Scott was largely forgotten by history and seems to have seen none of the money from his invention.
The above is speculative and not based on evidence but it is rather a notable coincidence: is it not?
However, the fact remains that Henry Timken didn’t invent the tapered roller bearing and that John Lincoln Scott did.
References
(1) https://boulderjewishnews.org/2009/an-informal-list-of-jewish-inventions-innovations-and-radical-ideas/
(2) https://christianislamicforum.wordpress.com/dedicated-to-our-jewish-brethren/
(3) Gerald Foye, 2002, ‘Royal R. Rife: Humanitarian’, 1st Edition, New Century Press: Chorley, pp. 42-44
(4) https://patents.google.com/patent/US552008A/