While writing this commentary, I received the news of the shocking death of Professor Akio Kawano of the physics and chemistry laboratory. Originally, Professor Kawano planned to write the commentary related to this subject based on his lecture at the "100th Birthday Anniversary of F. P. Bowden Memorial Symposium," supervised by the Japanese Society of Tribologists Third Category Wear Research Committee held on November 28, 2003. However, because of his physical condition, it was decided that I would take over. In writing this commentary I was allowed to refer to Professor Kawano's previously mentioned commentary whose scholarship of this subject was deep. This commentary is one many in which many people shared in writing about the accomplishments of P. P. Bowden, at the hundredth anniversary of his birth. There cannot be anyone who researches tribology who does not know of Bowden. He is the person who is regarded as the founder of modern tribology (at his birth, the term "tribology" did not exist). Before Bowden's research regarding friction force generation mechanism, there was Coulomb's roughness theory advocated by and Desaguliers's adhesion theory. As both theories can explain the Coulomb-Amontons law of friction, before Bowden's research, the true nature of the friction force was not clear.
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