User:Mdd/History of technical drawing

Page from Four Books on Measurement by Albrecht Dürer, 1522. In this work Dürer discusses an assortment of mechanisms for drawing in perspective from models and provides woodcut illustrations of these methods that are often reproduced in discussions of perspective.

The history of technical drawing has its roots in the early civilization, and drawing itself even beyond in the hunting-gathering societies. Back in time "people drew before they built", but in the course of history the usage of plans and technical drawings most likely have long been limited to the recording of existing features. In Ancient Egypt probably a variety of technical drawings had been in use for that purpose.

Since the Renaissance the design and usage of technical drawings became more advanced and differentiated. The useage of sketch design, and the usage of plans for construction purposes gradually became a more common practise. Underlying mathematical principles of technical drawing have been developed starting with principles of perspective in the Renaissance, and the principles of projection and projective geometry in the Enlightenment.

The technical drawing discipline itself has evolved into many sub disciplines since the Renaissance. Surveying and cartography went their separate ways in the 16-17th century. Engineering drawings were being represented since the end of the 16th century in specific picture books, entitled Theatrum machinarum (theater of machines). Since those days most engineering drawings were produced by engineers or craftsmen, until in the 19th century the specialised draughtsmen in industry and architectural practices took over. With the broadening of the engineering disciplines, specialized education emerged in which technical drawing played a major role.

The study of technical drawing is scattered across a wide range of fields from art history, the history of cartography, to the history of science and the history of technology. Its history has long been a neglected field on the history of science. This study count as interpretive challenges to industrial historians, because the technical drawings don't speak for themselves.

Overview

Technical drawing and scientific visualisations more in general nowadays exists in separate practices, such as architectural drawing, cartography, engineering drawings, statistical graphics, technical illustration, etc. The have a common origin in the history of mankind, and the evolution of its cognitive and technical abilities. In the human evolution, "drawing of images has been a part of human cultural production for a very long time."

The types of technical illustration nowadays are different in form and usage, and range from sketches to presentation drawings. For a better understanding of modern engineering drawings, Baynes & Pugh (1992) proposed a basic typology of drawings in five types of drawings:

• "Designers' Drawings : These relate to the stage in development when the engineer is considering broad alternatives and putting forward outline schemes. They are frequently found in notebooks kept by senior engineers and are often very individual in style...."
• "Project Drawings : Like designers' drawings these show proposals in broad outline. However, they are not personalized; instead they are produced according to accepted rules and conventions, often by drawings offices in established companies. They are often drawn in a relatively small scale..."
• "Production Drawings : These are perhaps what most people think of as engineering drawings. Typically, they conform to a sequence starting with a general arrangement drawing and covering every detail of the product to be manufactured."
• "Presentation and Maintenance Drawings : Many of the finest drawings which now survive are presentation drawings, that is, drawings made of the product after it had been finished. Frequently they are the work of skilled draughtsmen, based on measurements taken by apprentices as part of their training..."
• "Technical Illustrations : These are illustrations for technical or popularizing books that use the conventions of engineering drawing. In the nineteenth century, they reached a very high level of skill and presentation."

Looking further into the origin of technical drawing needs to take into account, that in the earlier days images had an even bigger usage. Drawings could serve as "ritual image, as sympathetic magic, and as story-telling... [in other words] as a totem, a palladium, a mnemonic, and as an important instrument of human creative practice." Robbins and Cullinan (1994) further explained:

As a symbol, drawing has a dual and contradictory nature. Materially constituted, drawing is the phenomenal representation of a conceptual practice. It is a vision or idea on a surface, usually paper. Once constituted phenomenally, drawing can be and often seen as autonomous of its production. For example, a drawing produced for a religious ritual can itself become an object of power and worship, represents a conceptual production and practice, can also provide a code or template that guides the social production of the object it represents.

Parallel to the history of technical drawing there has been an evolution of underlying mathematical principles, developed in fields such as geometry, descriptive geometry, projective geometry, etc. Drawing practises and mathematical principles mostly developed along separate lines, which only occasionally interacted.

The study of the history of technical drawing took off in the 1950s and 1960s with the seminal work of Franz Maria Feldhaus, Geschichte des technischen Zeichnens, Oldenburg, 1953 (translation: The History of Technical Drawing, New York, 1963; and the appearance of Peter Jeffrey Booker's A history of engineering drawing. in 1963. With the specialization into the separate technical drawing disciplines, studies of its history are often limited to the development of the specific field, to drawing techniques, or drawing instruments.

Origins of technical drawing

Prehistoric times

Technical drawing has its historical roots in drawing, which nowadays is considered a form of visual art. About the origin of drawing obvious assumptions have been made, such as, that pictures are an expression of ideas, and that they are made to be understood by others. Feldhaus (1963) confirmed this in the opening line of his work:

From the time man began to think, invent and actively create, he has endeavored to express his thoughts pictorially, both for his own assistance and to make himself understood by others...

It is generally understood, that from the dawn of mankind drawings have been made intentionally, and were part of the "human cultural production." Madsen & Madsen (2011) summarized this early use of images more in detail:

Prehistoric humans created images on cave walls and rocks as a form of communication for hunting and gathering societies, to provide ritual or spiritual meaning, and for decoration. Prehistoric drawings and paintings, known as pictograms, and carvings, known as petroglyphs, show a variety of animals and human shapes... Pictograms and petroglyphs... do represent early graphic forms of communication.

Timeline

• 38.000 BC. Oldest known Cave drawings
• 32,500 BC. Oldest known star chart, a carved ivory Mammoth tusk. with a carving that resembles the constellation Orion.
• 33,000 to 10,000 BC. Star chart drawing on the wall of the Lascaux caves in France has a graphical representation of the Pleiades open cluster of stars.
• 19,000 BC. Another star chart panel, created more than 21,000 years ago, was found in the La Tête du Lion grotto.
• 7th millennium BCE - Drawing of A wall painting that might depict the ancient Anatolian city of Çatalhöyük (previously known as Catal Huyuk or Çatal Hüyük)

Middle ages

Medieval technical drawing practice from the East

• 
  Vivarium from Bamberg manuscript of Cassiodorus Institutiones, 8th c.
• 
  Al-Muradi, The Book of Secrets in the Results of Thoughts, 11th c.
• 
  Al-Jazari Automata, 1205
• 
  Al-Jazari water device, 13th c.
• 
  Al-Jazari Musical Toy, 13th c.

Renaissance

The Renaissance brought the development of perspective in drawing, sketch drawing, the research and development of underlying mathematical principles...

The study of the history of technical drawing

In 1960 the German engineer and d historians of science Franz Maria Feldhaus (1874-1957) published one of the first comprehensive studies on the history of technical drawing in German, entitled Geschichte des technischen Zeichnens. In 1963 the English translation was published, and in that same year the English engineer and historian of technology published his A history of engineering drawing. These works gave a first sketch of the field, yet the Dutch/Canadian historian of science Kim H. Veltman in 1979 declared the story of the historical development of technical drawing largely untold. He explained:

Although there exist a host of specialized studies on the history of drawing techniques (1) and the history of technical drawing instruments (2), the story of the general context in which technical drawing emerged remains largely untold. An obvious reason is that this field lies uncomfortably between the realms of art history, the history of cartography, science and technology.

According to the American art historian and emeritus professor at Williams College Samuel Edgerton (born 1926) this lack of literature was caused by a lack of interest by historians of science in this matter. In his 1985 article The renaissance development of the scientific illustration Edgerton declared:

Historians of science have shown a little more curiosity, but they too tend to treat scientific pictures only as after images of verbal ideas. - Few historians of any kind have studied the scientific illustration as a unique form of pictorial language, with its own "grammar and syntax"; that is, symbols and conventions conveying information just as do words and sentences. Nor have many scholars even applied to the scientific illustration the tools of iconology, that wonderful subdiscipline of art history which explains how pictorial symbols work, how they are derived and change in form and meaning , and most important of all, how they reveal profound truths about the society which produced them.

Exciting recently developments have been the emerging fields of scientific visualisation, data visualisation and information visualisation. There is also interest in the visualisation of technical information from the fields of social sciences, resulting in visual sociology, visual anthropology, visual archeology, etc. As before interest are in techniques and instruments, and a common history is still out of the question.

Further reading

• Booker, Peter Jeffrey. A history of engineering drawing. (1963).
• Feldhaus, Franz Maria, Geschichte des technischen Zeichnens, Oldenburg, 1953; 2nd ed., Wilhelmshaven, 1959.
• Feldhaus, Franz Maria, The History of Technical Drawing, New York, 1963.
• Eugene S. Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind's Eye, 1977; 1992.
• Goodall, George. "The history of technical drawing," at facetation.blogspot.ch Jan. 21, 2008.
• Hambly, Maya. Drawing instruments, 1580-1980. Sotheby Parke Bernet Pubns, 1988.
• Lefèvre, Wolfgang ed. (2004). Picturing Machines 1400-1700 : How technical drawings shaped early engineering practice. MIT Press, 2004.
• Lozzi, Andrei, "History of Mechanical Design and Machine Drawing in the School of AMME," at web.aeromech.usyd.edu.au, accessed 12.2014.
• Madsen, David A., and David P. Madsen. Engineering drawing and design. Nelson Education, 2011; 2016.
• Robbins, Edward and Edward Cullinan (1994) "Drawing and Architectural Practice", in: Why Architects Draw. MIT Press, ISBN 0262181576. pp. 1-60;
• Rovida, Edoardo. Machines and Signs: A History of the Drawing of Machines, Springer Science & Business Media, 2012.
• Worthen, William Ezra, 1819-1897, Appletons' cyclopædia of technical drawing. (1896)