What if the problem is not the machine, but the rigidity of the bearing? Sven Wingquist asked himself this radical question in a Gothenburg textile factory in 1907, laying the foundation for the SKF empire. His self-aligning ball bearing was a revolution, because it was the first design that not only tolerated misalignment, but actively compensated for it. But the evolution of self-aligning continued. In 1919, Arvid Palmgren scaled this principle for the extreme loads of heavy industry and created the spherical roller bearing. To this day, these two bearing types form the backbone of every robust construction.

The hard truth of early heavy industry
Anyone operating a rolling mill, a mill or a paper factory around 1900 knew the problem from experience. Floors settled, shafts bent under load and temperature fluctuations distorted entire machine structures.
In a rigid bearing arrangement, even the smallest misalignment could trigger a chain reaction of friction, heat and costly downtime. It was a battle against physics — one that the standard bearings of the time could not win.
What was urgently needed was a solution that did not treat misalignment as a defect, but as a normal operating condition. This game changer eventually emerged where the problem was most acute: right in the middle of the rough factory floor.

1907: Sven Wingquist and the self-aligning ball bearing
The decisive step was taken by Sven Wingquist, head of maintenance at a Gothenburg textile factory. His design was as simple as it was ingenious, as he developed a double-row ball bearing whose outer ring had a spherical raceway. As the center of curvature lies exactly on the bearing axis, the inner ring and ball set can be freely adjusted. The result was immediately convincing, as the bearing automatically compensates for misalignments without generating performance-inhibiting constraining forces.

Wingquist patented this principle and founded Svenska Kullagerfabriken, or SKF for short, in the same year. The self-aligning ball bearing was thus far more than just a new product, it was the actual founding impulse of a world market leader.

While the bearing proved to be excellent for light to medium loads, it reached its physical limits in heavy industry. With massive radial and axial forces, as they occur in rolling mills, the point contact of the balls became the limiting factor, as the contact surface was simply too small for extreme loads. There was no solution that transferred the principle of self-adjustability to the load values of heavy industry. The answer came twelve years later from an unexpected direction.

1919: Arvid Palmgren develops the spherical roller bearing
Arvid Palmgren did not join SKF in 1917 as a design engineer, but was initially responsible for public relations. However, as he was to write about technology that he himself did not yet fully understand, he immersed himself in the fundamentals of rolling bearing technology. When SKF needed a solution for the extreme requirements of railroad wheelsets in 1918, he quickly took over the development work. He spent almost six months testing various roller configurations and geometries, as there were hardly any reliable calculation bases at the time.

In June 1919, he finally presented the groundbreaking result in the form of a double-row spherical roller bearing with barrel-shaped rollers. Although the basic principle of Wingquist’s spherical outer ring raceway was retained, the decisive technological leap was in the load distribution. While balls only have point contact, rollers offer line contact. The result was a massive increase in radial load carrying capacity while at the same time absorbing high axial forces from both directions. The spherical roller bearing was thus ready for heavy industry and for applications that were still beyond the realms of technical feasibility in 1907.

The common design principle
What spherical roller bearings and spherical roller bearings have in common is much more than their common origin. Both are based on the same design breakthrough, as the spherical outer ring raceway allows angular movements of the inner ring without creating damaging constraining forces inside. The angular movement only differs depending on the design, with the self-aligning ball bearing compensating for misalignments of up to 3 degrees, while the spherical roller bearing can cope with up to 2 degrees, depending on the size and sealing. In both cases, this is crucial where long shafts, flexible foundations or temperature changes push mechanical systems to their limits. While the self-aligning ball bearing laid the technological foundation, the spherical roller bearing made SKF an indispensable partner for global heavy industry.

Continuous further development up to the modern age
SKF has continuously perfected the design since 1919 and adapted it to new requirements over the decades. In 1951, the C design with a loose guide ring was developed, which significantly reduced friction problems with combined loads. This was followed in 1979 by the CC version with self-guiding rollers, in which computer-aided analyses were used for the first time specifically to optimize geometry. With the E version from 1989, a newly designed high-performance cage enabled the use of more and larger rollers with unchanged external dimensions, which significantly increased the load rating without restricting the important angular mobility.

At the end of the 1990s, SKF once again pushed the boundaries of what was possible with the introduction of the Explorer class. Extremely pure steel, refined heat treatment, optimized internal geometries and improved surface structures ensured that the bearings could support higher loads with identical dimensions and achieve a significantly longer service life. This finally brought the development into the modern age, away from purely robust heavy industrial bearings and towards a highly efficient generation of bearings for the 21st century.

What began in 1919 as a specialized solution for rail vehicles has now penetrated almost every industry. Whether paper machines, rolling mills, conveyor technology, mills, ship propulsion systems, mining or sugar processing: wherever extreme loads, difficult operating conditions and long service lives come together, the spherical roller bearing is firmly established. It now also plays a key role in wind energy, where it reliably absorbs the massive deflections of the rotor shafts and thus ensures the availability of the systems.

A founding story with a long-term impact
For Arvid Palmgren, the development of the spherical roller bearing was just the beginning of a lifelong mission for rolling bearing technology. In 1924, together with Gustaf Lundberg, he provided the mathematical answer to the fundamental question of durability and established the world’s first well-founded service life calculation. In doing so, he transformed the mere empirical knowledge of the early years of industry into an exact science that has endured worldwide to this day. For this achievement, he was awarded the prestigious Gold Medal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 1930.

The history of these two bearing types remains inextricably woven into SKF’s DNA. Wingquist recognized the underlying problem in 1907 and created the mechanical principle, while Palmgren scaled it up for the toughest practical requirements in 1919. What both inventors had in common was their sober view of real industrial reality, which is often uneven, difficult and rarely perfect. Their solutions were so ingenious because they accepted the imperfection of the machine as a law. The fact that these principles still form the indispensable backbone of industry today is impressive proof that the best technical answers do not require spectacle, but simply precision.