With this 13th in the series of International Conferences on Fluid Sealing these meetings move into their third decade. To be precise it is now thirty-one years since BHRA, as it then was, convened, with no little trepidation, the first of these Conferences in Ashford, England. The massive set of proceedings now occupies a considerable length of shelf in my bookcase and represents a tremendous technological resource - over 400 separate papers. It is interesting that I seem to refer most often to the earlier volumes, probably most of all to the very first. Perhaps this is because this volume marks the beginning of "historic times", AD 0, for fluid sealing technology. There were of course important publications in this field even before 1961. A notable example is the seminal work of my predecessor at BHRA, Dr D. F. Denny, whose researches on reciprocating fluid power seals, "The sealing mechanism of flexible packings", was published in 1947 by a long since defunct government department, the Ministry of Supply. Another notable source is the Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers' 1957 Conference on Lubrication and Wear. However, there is more to fluid st". aling technology than just tribology, as we must now call lubrication and wear, interest in static seals has really come to the fore in recent years - witness the large batch of papers dealing with this subject in the present Conference.