Amontons and Coulomb, Friction’s Founding Fathers

As is now generally known, the idea that frictional force is proportional to normal force stems from a paper by Guillaume Amontons [1], published in the Mémoires de Mathématique et de Physique of the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris for 1699, in the very first volume following renewal of the Academy’s royal charter. Presented on December 19 of that year, it was entitled “On the resistance caused in machines, by the friction of their component parts as well as by stiffness of the cords used there, and the way to calculate the one and the other.” I have inspected the paper in a second edition of the Mémoires published in Amsterdam in 1734 [2]. But rather than giving you my translation, I prefer to preserve some of the flavor of that time by quoting the translation in the abridgement of the Mémoires published in 1742 by two English academics [3].