The well and the wheel—some of the oldest inventions of mankind—were themselves already dependent on machine elements. Over the years, ropes as the oldest class of machine elements enabled numerous innovations such as draw wells, sailing and later aircraft construction. Machine elements have always been at the center of numerous innovations. More than ever, the further development of classic machine elements, such as gears and bearings, enables innovative solutions for tomorrow’s problems: a stocktaking.

Machine Elements Are Everywhere

 In everyday speech, even technophobes use machine elements in many places to figuratively represent their opinions. Sayings such as “Don’t reinvent the wheel” or “Sand in the gears” are ubiquitous, generally understood and accepted. It is also impossible to imagine everyday life without the symbolism of machine elements. Just imagine searching for the settings on a smartphone without the stylized gear wheel, the Mainz coat of arms without the wheel, or the Rotary Club without the machine elements in its trademark ). Many people are not aware of the fact that many machine elements originate from a development spanning thousands of years and that today it is impossible to imagine modern mechanical and plant engineering products without them. This article, developed by the Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft für Produktentwicklung (Scientific Society for Product Development, WiGeP), analyzes the evolution of two selected classes of machine elements, formulates a law to describe their development in terms of Moore’s law and extrapolates into the future. While transistors, for whose architecture Moore’s law was originally formulated (Ref.1),have now physically reached the highest spatial density, the authors believe that much is still achievable in machine elements due to the possibilities for synthesizing new system solutions. Despite the very long history of individual machine elements, they are constantly being developed further and digitalization offers machine elements a high potential for innovation.