This paper discusses the science of material effort from the historical viewpoint. Two general scientific tools: the geometrical descriptive method of Mohr, and the energetic method of Huber are compared and evaluated from the very beginning. Three appropriate stress invariants are taken into account: stress intensity, stress triaxiality and stress shearness. Especially, much attention is devoted to explanation of the stress shearness invariant, which aims at describing the Lode parameter in a more analytical manner. Two different tools of finding a proper yield surface which contains the above mentioned three stress invariants are discussed in the literature perspective. In particular, the three-parameter yield surface, called the Burzyński-Pęcherski hypothesis is researched and explained from this new point of view.