ABSTRACT
The main goal of this chapter, titled as "Brief Notes on the History of Methods of Machining Gears and of Design of Gear Cutting Tools", is to briefly outline most of the fundamental accomplishments in the field on the methods of cutting gear teeth and of the novel designs of special-purpose gear cutting tools. The oldest surviving relic containing gears is the Antikythera mechanism, named for the Greek island near which the mechanism was discovered in a sunken ship in 1900. The history of gear cutting mechanisms, as well as of gear cutting tools, began in the early sixteenth century and may be even associated with some of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings. For generating straight bevel gears, a design of gear planing machine was proposed by Gleason. The describing method of bevel gear generation was the first to be utilized. A single-point gear cutting tool is used in this machine to cut straight bevel gears.
