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General quotes

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About the historical development of technical drawing
  • The history of technical drawing is rich and multi-layered; it winds from antiquity to the modern era and from industry to academia and back again.
  • Drawing of images has been a part of human cultural production for a very long time. If evidence from hunting-gathering societies is any guide, people drew before they built. A ritual image, as sympathetic magic, and as story-telling, drawing has served as a totem, a palladium, a mnemonic, and as an important instrument of human creative practice.
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. Many of us do this when we use drawings that we sketch Many of us do this when we use drawings that we sketch onto solid objects to make something.
  • Edward Robbins and Edward Cullinan (1994) "Drawing and Architectural Practice", in: Why Architects Draw. MIT Press, ISBN 0262181576. pp. 1-60; p. 7
  • For thousands of years, designers of ancient structures and machines used sketches, drawings, and documents to represent inventions and architecture and help design and distribute information to workers. However, activities such as farming, craft making, and toolmaking, and construction generally followed established standards of the time without the use of formal drawings as a guide. Production was more like a form of art than engineering, and each item was unique.
About the impact of the history of technical drawing
  • Drawing, particularly in the first steps of human development, could be regarded as a “substitution” for photography: the human being, after the realization of an artifact, has immediately the idea of expressing such an artifact with graphic representations, obtained by the currently available means, such as painting, engraving, relief, windows. Such representations can be regarded as the first expression of drawing of “machines”, where the word “machine” is intended as the first human realizations with technical aims.
    • Edoardo Rovida. Machines and Signs: A History of the Drawing of Machines. 2012, p. 4.
  • Just as grammars were the consort of modern empire, so, I will argue in this article, are technological representations the consort of modern technological bureaucracy. By technological representations, I mean the plans, blueprints, gauges, rulebooks, instruction manuals, and models--the marks on paper, wood, and steel--that describe and abstract technology. Technological representations, I argue, make it easier to bring technological actions under the control of authority.
    • Steven Lubar, "Representation and power." Technology and Culture 36.2 (1995): S54-S82.
About the study of the history of technical drawing
  • 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.
  • Historians of science have shown a little more curiosity, but they too tend to treat scientific pictures only as afterimages 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.
    • Samuel Edgerton. "The renaissance development of the scientific illustration." Science and the arts in the renaissance (1985): 168-197. p. 168
  • Unlike traditional written records, however, mechanical drawings do pose some special interpretive challenges for industrial historians. In addition to the puzzle of deciphering a visual representation, the chief problem of drawings-as-sources is their anti-contextual character. Contexts give meaning to bojects, and the engineers, draftsmen, and workers who made and used drawings constantly interpreted them with a number of contexts in mind: who originated an innovation, what precedents could memory or records provide as a guide in designing that innovation, could shop floor tooling and workers make the mechanism as drawn, and so on. But those contexts never received any explicit notation on the plan. Indeed, dimensional drawings generally are mute regarding the motive behind the innovation depicted, the cost of production and the sales price, the buyer, the mechanism's qualities in service, or even whether it was built at all. Such plans shed only indirect light on a firm's internal organization and its production methods, while drawings in isolation are frustratingly mute on key issues like interactions that took place between draftsmen, foremen, and skilled workers.
    • Brown (1999, p. 48), cited in George Goodall (2008).
    • Goodall commented: "Brown (1999) notes that drawings can only be really interpreted in conjunction with other information sources such as business journals, memoirs, business records, patent information, etc. One of the most significant issues for researchers is the issue of context."

Origins (quotes)

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Prehistoric times

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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)
Prehistoric technical drawing practice
General quotes
  • The wealth of man's knowledge was largely handled down through the medium of drawing. Archeology tells us that the earliest man of the Old Stone Age (1,000,000 to 14,000 B.C.) developed crude stone tools and weapons. He was concerned almost exclusively with the problems of survival. In the Mesolithic Age (14,000 to 10,000 B.C.) man moved northward and found shelter in caves. He developed scraping and cutting tools and discovered the use of flint, fire, heat. By the end of this period, he had a little spare time and...
    • Eugene G. Paré (1959), Engineering Drawing, p. 1-2
  • 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 (see Figure 1.9). Pictograms and petroglyphs are not engineering drawings, but they do represent early graphic forms of communication.


Early civilisations

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Timeline
Early civilisation technical drawing practice
General quotes
  • On the walls of the rock tombs and temples of the New Kingdom, Egyptian artists drew accurate and detailed elevations of pylons, chapels, palaces, private houses, and other buildings. Such artists were certainly capable of drawing architectural plans and elevations for building purposes as well, but few drawings of this type have survived; in fact, no true building plan as executed by an architect for construction purposes has been preserved.
Building without ground plans is unthinkable to us. But were they really of the same importance to ancient Egyptian builders? Perhaps a rough sketch and drawings of some architectural details were sufficient. We know that Egyptian architects tried to develop their ideas on the basis of ancient prototypes that must have been familiar to them. Was this knowledge based on scholarly studies of existing buildings or on records written by architects about their buildings, similar to those of classical architects, as mentioned in the preface of Vitruvius's book?
  • Plans and architectural Drawings in Ancient Egypt
Surviving plans and architectural drawings seem to be records of existing features, rather than having been used for construction purposes. Models of columns and other architectural elements common in the Late and Ptolemaic Period might have have been used as prototypes for modeling the real examples.
Plans and architectural drawings
  • Table 1.1. Plans and architectural Drawings
Object - Date - Location - Bibliography
1. Curve coordinates for arch or vault; ostrakon - Djoser (?) - Cairo - B. Gunn, ASAE 26 (1926): 197-202; CEAEM, 52-53, figs. 53, 54[1]
2 Plan of garden or temple; paving slab - Mentuhotep - MMA 22.3.30[2] - Arnold and Winlock, Mentuhotep, 23, fig. 9; CEAEM, 57-59. figs. 59.
3. Plan of building; paving slab - Senusret I - MMA 14.3.15 - Arnold, Senwosret I i, 98, fig. 47
4. Plan of temple of Heliopolis (Hathor?); slate tablet - Dynasty 14 - Turin - H. Ricke, ZAS 71 (1935): 1 1 1-133
5. Sketch of building; ostrakon - Amenemhat III - Berlin - Alan Gardiner, The Ramesseum Papyri (Oxford, 1955). fig. 2
6. Sketch plan of a tomb (Theban tomb no 71?); ostrakon - Eighteenth Dynasty - Cairo CG 66262 - W. C. Hayes, Ostraka and Name Stones (New York, 1942), 15,
7. Sketch plan of a house; ostrakon - Eighteenth Dynasty - Cairo ? - Unpublished
8. Sketch plan of an estate; wooden panel - Eighteenth Dynasty - New York MMA.14.108 - N. de Garis Davies, J£A 4 (1917): 194-199; CEAEM, 56-57, fig. 57
9. Sketch plan of a house; scratched into floor - Amarna period - Amarna - J. D. S. Pendlebury, The City of Akhenaten III (London, 1951), pi. 36 [4-5]
10. Plan of a chapel with pillars; ostrakon - Eighteenth/Nineteenth Dynasty - BM 41228 - S.R.K. Glanville, “Working Plan for a Shrine,” JEA 16, 1930, pp. 237–39.
11. Elevation of a shrine; papyrus "from Ghurab" - Eighteenth Dynasty - UC 27234 - W.M. Flinders Petrie, “Egyptian Working Drawings,” Ancient Egypt 3, 1926, pp. 24–27.
12. Plan of a large temple; graffito in a quarry - Amarna period? - Sheikh Said - N. de Garis Davies, Ancient Egypt (1917); 21-25
13. Plan of the tomb of Ramesses IV; papyrus - Ramesses IV - Turin 1885 - H. Carter and A. H. Gardiner, 'The tomb of Ramesses IV and the Turin plan of a royal tomb', Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 4, 1917, pp.134-144.
14. Plan of the tomb of Ramesses IX; ostrakon from Biban el-Muluk - Ramesses IX - Cairo CG 25184 - G. Daressy, Ostraca (Cairo, 1901), 35, pi. 32; CEAEM, 51, fig. 50
15. Plan of room with four pillars; ostrakon - Ramesside? - Cairo CG 51936 - R. Engelbach, ASAE 27 (1927): 72—75; CEAEM, 51, fig. 51
16. Plan of staircase and door; ostrakon from Biban el-Muluk - Ramesside? - Cairo - CEAEM, 52, fig 52.
  • Dieter Arnold. Building in Egypt: Pharaonic Stone Masonry, 1991. p. 7
  • Source (1) is probably: Battiscombe Gunn. "Inscriptions from the step pyramid site." Annales du Service des Antiquités de l'Égypte (SAE) 26 (1926): 197-202;
First technical drawing on Egyptian sculpture, 21th c. BC
  • The Caldean engineer Gudea produced the first known technical drawing 2130 BC. It is inscribed on a stone tablet and depicts the floor plan of a fortress. It should be noted that this drawing was created thousands of years before paper was invented (Giesecke, Spencer, & Hill, 1974).
  • The earliest example of a ‘drawing’ that objectively represents an engineering product to scale in two dimensions was a plan of a fort scraped on a clay tablet circa 4000 BC, as shown below... Plan of a fortress (part of a statue now in the Louvre) from the earliest period of Chaldean art, 4000 BC. Transactions ASCE May 1891.
    • Andrei Lozzi, "History of Mechanical Design and Machine Drawing in the School of AMME," at web.aeromech.usyd.edu.au, accessed 12.2014.

Greece and Rome

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Timeline
  • 4th BC. Sketch drawing found in Greece temples
  • 300 BC. Euclid published his Elements in 13 books on the foundations of Geometry
  • 30 BC. Vitruvius wrote treatise on architecture.
  • 228 AD. Rome had an "engineering" school.[3]
Greece and Rome technical drawing practice
Quotes
  • Greek architects "drew" with words. Although architectural models were used as a means of communicating ideas as early as 725 B.C. at Perachora, architectural drawings (whether working drawings or sketches) are not mentioned in Greek his- torical or literary sources. By the fifth century B.C. "architects'like Ictinus and Kallicrates used several means of giving builders accurate information to guide them in the construction of temples, which were by that time highly conventionalized buildings. The most important of these, calles Syngraphai, were detailed descriptive specifications which even included dementions. Details such as cornice molding and pieces of ornamental sculpture were described through the use of the Paradeigma, a full-scale mock-up or model, and the Anagrapheus, or template.
    • Mark Hewitt. "Representational Forms and Modes of Conception," Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter, 1985), pp. 2-9; p. 2
  • In the 5th century B.C.E. geometry was being developed in Greece by mathematicians including Pythagoras, Archimedes and Euclid. Greek architects continued to develop techniques, including perspective, for structures such as the Parthenon through the 4th century B.C.E.
    In the last century B.C.E. a Roman architect, Marcus Vitruvius Pollio wrote a ten-volume treatise titled De Architecture. This was apparently lost in the Middle Ages and rediscovered in the 15th century. It remained a principle text until the 19th century. Among other things Vitruvius noted compasses for drawing circles in his treatise.
    • La Verne Abe Harris, and Frederick Meyers. "Engineering design graphics: Into the 21st century." Engineering Design Graphics Journal 71.3 (2009).
  • We can only assume that the Greek architects and Roman engineers created drawings.; None have survived to the present era. The great architect Vitruvius, however, declared that the “architect must be skilful with the pencil and have a knowledge of drawing so that he readily can make the drawings required to show the appearance of the work he proposes to construct.” (Vitruvius Pollio, 1692). Vitruvius specifically recommended that architects adopt three different kinds of architectural representation, or ideae. In Book I.2 of De architectura, he describes ichnographia, or the ground plan, orthographia, or the vertical frontal image, and scaenographia. The first two types of representation are still in common use with modern orthographic drawings. The third classification, however, has been interpreted in different ways. Some authors have interpreted scaenographia as section and some have interpreted it as perspective.
    The use of images was by no means universal or endorsed in the ancient world. Both Pliny and Galen condemned the practice. Carpo notes: "Pliny is categorical: the destiny of an image in a manuscript is unpredictable. No one can tell how the next copyist may distort it." (Carpo, 1998, p.163)...

Middle ages

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Timeline
  • 807. Harun al-Rashid founded a technical school in Baghdad.[3]
  • 850. The Book of Ingenious Devices, a large illustrated work on mechanical devices, was published in 850 in Baghdad, Iraq.
  • 9th c. Plan of Saint Gall, Early 9th century.
  • 12th c. Villard de Honnecourt draw a famous sketch book, 13th century.
  • 12th c. The title of engineer appears in the twelfth century, its use spreading under the urgings of the Crusaders who needed military engineers to back and encourage their Faith.[3]
  • 14th c. Opicinus de Canistris (1296 – c. 1353)
Medieval technical drawing practice
Quotes about the study of medieval drawing
  • The role of drawing in medieval design
During the past three decades. scholars in medieval architecture have brought forward new and more detailed information about late Gothic architects and their design processes. John Harvey. for example. in his book on the medieval architects refutes earlier notions that these architects were either architects were either anonymous masons working on the scaffold or clerics who practiced design as a sideline (Harvey 1972). Harvey insists that medieval architects functioned as full-time and highly skilled directors of construction. specially trained. well respected. and often celebrated for their work.
  • Daniel M. Herbert. Architectural Study Drawings John Wiley & Sons, 15 mei 1993. p. 26
  • François Bucher refers to his having studies more than 2200 medieval plans and designs that were preserved throughout Europe (Bucher 1968, 49). From these studies he lists five kinds of drawings (aside from templates and models). embracing theoretical designs. educational plans. working plans. special plans. and sketch and lodge-books. He notes that Gothic planning "down to the details was based on a highly coordinated system of geometric progression" (50). Bucher gives particular attention to a sketch plan. made about 1500 by Benedikt Ried. for the vaulting over a palace stairway (figure 2-4). describing it as a "quick first concept... dashed off entirely with a compass... [Its) quick. almost sloppy design... betrays the eye of a master..." (56).
    • Daniel M. Herbert. Architectural Study Drawings John Wiley & Sons, 15 mei 1993. p. 26
Quotes about medieval drawing and their role in the design process
  • I have argued else that mediaeval architectural drawings - both elevations and plans - were often produced primarily for the benefit of the building patron, who could get a better idea from such drawings as to what the complete building would look like [Shelby, 1964]. My argument now appears to have been somewhat exaggerated, in the light of the astonishingly large number and variety of architectural drawings which Professor François Bucher has recovered from the libraries and archives of Europe. His figures of "2,200 mediaeval plans and designs as well as treatises and working drawings" far exceeds the estimates even of those who have emphasized the significance of drawings in the mediaeval building process..."
    • Lon R. Shelby. "Mediaeval Masons' Templates," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 30 No. 2, May, 1971; (pp. 140-154); p. 141
  • I believe it is still correct to say that in medieval buildings there was not the ordered progression on modern building practice, form the architectural drawing through the shop drawing to the design and construction of mason's templates. The reason is simple enough; the medieval master mason combined in himself the equivalents of the modern architecture, stone contractor, building contractor and construction supervisor.
    • Lon R. Shelby. "Mediaeval Masons' Templates," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 30 No. 2, May, 1971; (pp. 140-154); p. 142 ; As cited in: Robbins and Cullinan (1994;12)
  • Medieval master masons, who also relied on full-scale templates and models during construction, designed extraordinarily complex cathedrals and churches primarily through the use of a myriad of different kinds of plan drawings. (Fig.1) These were laid out not arithmetically but geometrically, using simple tools such as compasses and squares. The intricate geometric formulae, which formed the canon of Gothic architectural design were passed down through the guilds or masonic lodges, falling under the rubric of the "Art of Geometry." Accurately measured and proportioned elevation drawings (using orthogonal projection) are rare among collections of fourteenth and fifteenth-century Gothic drawings. Evidence suggests that they played a much less significant role in design and construction than they do today.
    • Mark Hewitt. "Representational Forms and Modes of Conception," Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter, 1985), pp. 2-9; p. 2
  • [Harvey (1972)] also comments on the increase in the sophistication of architectural drawings as well as the frequency of their use from the twelfth through the fifteenth century in northern Europe.
    • Daniel M. Herbert. Architectural Study Drawings John Wiley & Sons, 15 mei 1993. p. 26
Quotes about architects
  • In spite of the fact that English master masons of the later Middle Ages were developing increasing skills in architectural drawing, they had not yet perfected their drafting techniques to the point where the drawings alone were adequate instruments for directing the masons in the technical processes of construction.
    • Shelby (1971); As cited in: Robbins and Cullinan (1994;12)
  • The techniques used in the various drawings... merit special attention since it is here that the processes of thirteenth-century design are laid bare
    • Robert Branner; As cited in: Robbins and Cullinan (1994;12)
  • Afterwards, from about seventeen to twenty-one, his main concern was to master and to memorize the very many problems in practical geometry involved in setting-out arch and vault voussoirs, tracery, and proportional design....
  • [Harvey (1982)] notes that medieval architects were trained from within the building crafts, usually in masonry or carpentry. He describes their early education in book learning. their years of craft apprenticeship. and their final four years of specialized training in drawing. In these final years "[their] main concern was to master and to memorize the very many problems in practical geometry involved in setting-out arch and vault voussoirs. tracery. and proportional design" 199). For medieval architects. training in proportional design consisted of solving. by means of rule and compass. specific geometric layout problems learned by rote and passed down from generation to generation (98)...
    • Daniel M. Herbert. Architectural Study Drawings John Wiley & Sons, 15 mei 1993. p. 26
About specific books
  • Kitab al-Hiyal (The Book of Ingenious Devices). This is most probably a work of Ahmad. The treatise, in the form of a catalogue of machines, is a large illustrated work on mechanical devices including automata. Some of these inventions include: valve, float valve, feedback controller, automatic flute player, a programmable machine, trick devices, and self-trimming lamp. The book describes and explains a total of 1oo devices in great detail, 73 of which are trick vessels and the other 15, automatic control systems. All are generally based on aerostatic and hydrostatic pressure principles. The book provides the first examples of various mechanical elements, technical drawings, logic and command systems, and especially automatically controlled systems. The devices were designed to be partly informative and partly entertaining. Their mastery of delicate controls was unsurpassed until fairly recent times.
    • Salim Ayduz, ‎Ibrahim Kalin, ‎Caner Dagli (2014), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Science, and Technology in Islam. p. 88

Renaissance

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Timeline
Renaissance technical drawing practice
Renaissance technical drawing theory
Renaissance technical drawing people
Quotes about the role of drawing in renaissance design
  • Great advances in our abilities to convey visual information began during the Renaissance. A series of fundamental graphic inventions, including printing, linear perspective, and projective geometry, greatly enhanced the precision with which a vision in one person's mind might be conveyed by material means — drawings — across space and time to another person's mind.
    • Ferguson (1977, 75) : Chapter 4 Tools of Visualization
  • The greatest impetus to scientific illustration during the Renaissance, however, came from yet another peculiarity of Western European culture. This was the special profession of ingegnere, best translated into modern English as "artisan-engineer." Both Filippo Brunelleschi, the architect, and Leonardo da Vinci, the painter, considered themselves as ingegneri first ad "artists" in our more familiar self-expressive sense only secondary...
    • Samuel Edgerton. "The renaissance development of the scientific illustration." Science and the arts in the renaissance (1985): 168-197. p. 168
  • [Mark Hewitt. in his article entitled "Representational Forms and Modes of Conception," describes the role of these artist-architects in developing the new form of drawing in design:]
Renaissance artist/architects. Leonardo foremost. gave us the skeptical, modern, trial-and-error mode of design, stemming from the emergence of the sketch as a design tool. The first architects to use this method were Francesco di Giorgio Martini... and later the architects of the St. Peter's shop. notably Baldassare Peruzzi and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger.
  • Mark Hewitt. "Representational Forms and Modes of Conception," Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter, 1985), pp. 2-9; p. 7; as cited in: Herbert (1993, 28).
  • The First technical drawings...
    • Rovida (2012, 32-)
  • The role of drawing in renaissance design
Around 1500, however, the role of drawing in design shifted. After 1500, the fundamental codes for design drawings and construction drawing no longer coincided. While masons and carpenters no doubt continued to make geometric layout drawings, a new sort of drawing — the study drawing — was invented in art and and architecture. That the invention of study drawings occurred in these two fields at the same time was no accident because it involved the same individuals.
  • Daniel M. Herbert. Architectural Study Drawings John Wiley & Sons, 15 mei 1993. p. 28
  • In the Renaissance, we see a merger of the liberal and mechanical arts, thanks profound social, economical, and cultural changes: the spread of production facilities brings with it the institutionalisation and protection of the craft and its form transmission.
In the drawings, visually sophisticated means are used for comprehensive and precise communications. Greater aesthetic attractiveness is an integral part of a new conception in the technical drawing, held out to highly technological content.
Technical drawings in general, and in particular the mechanical variety, see the first manifestations that are intentional, not plotted for decorative or illustrative occasional: it is the beginning of the evolution that will, thanks to the press, turn it into a literary genre with the “theatres of machines”...
  • Michela Cigola. "Descriptive geometry and mechanism science from antiquity to the 17th century. An introduction." in Distinguished Figures in Descriptive Geometry and Its Applications for Mechanism Science, 2015. p. 16-17
Quotes about engineering drawing, theatre of machines
  • A wide diffusion of the constructions required a larger diffusion of the technology and collection of machines and mechanisms were needed for the designers and for the teachers. A kind of textbooks with collection of machines and mechanisms were developed since the end of XVIth century. They reported mechanical designs, including indistinctly old, obsolete and new machines and mechanisms, in the form of "Theatrum machinarum". (Theatre of machines), i.e. specific drawings with a short commenting text, [l 1, 12]. The representation is more technical but a great pictorial background is still observable which can be considered due to the fact that a designer and a constructor have a large common culture as an "architect" since they got experience in the same "bottega" of a "maestro".
    • Michela Cigola. "On the evolution of mechanisms drawing." Conference Paper IXth IFToMM World Congress, July 1995. p. 3193 (online)
  • ... "Machine picture books" dating from the 1400s are collections of possible and impossible machines. Entitled Theatrum machinarum (theater of machines), these picture books are popular examples of the evocative power held by technological imagination.
    • David Kratzer, "The practical as instrument for technological imagination." Journal of Architectural Education 51.1 (1997): 32-36.</ref>
  • Early engineering drawings representing machines and buildings appear in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. These drawings were generally in the form of pictorial sketches with written descriptions that helped workers understand the intent of the drawings for fabrication or building. Early engineering drawings served as a reference for craft workers to construct a building or manufacture a product. Craft workers viewed the drawings and written descriptions and made interpretations based on their own experience and knowledge of current standard practices. Specific dimensions were not necessary, because each building or machine was different. Early engineering drawings were also an art form used during presentations to the persons who requested the designs.
Quotes from and about Alberti
  • Architect’s drawings, unlike painter’s perspectival views, require consistent lines, true angles, and “real measurements, drawn to scale
    • Alberti (1452), as cited in: Robbins and Cullinan (1994) Why Architects Draw.
  • An early author of architecture and engineering was an Italian man, Leon Battista Alberti. Leon’s writing covered a wide range of subjects, from architecture to town planning and from engineering to the philosophy of beauty. In 1435 and 1436, Leon also wrote two works that explored the need to incorporate more geometry in drawings. Leon also proposed drawings with multiple views rather than the commonly used pictorial drawings.
Quotes by and from Leonardo da Vinci
See also Leonardo da Vinci at wikiquote
  • Some of the best-known early engineering drawings are the work of Italian Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo is well known for his art, such as The Last Supper in 1498 and the Mona Lisa in 1507. He was also an inventor who designed machines such as the glider shown in Figure 1.10 and military equipment such * 15th c. Development of perspective in drawing.


17th century

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Timeline
  • 17th c. "Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) expanded the concept of geometry".[4]
  • 1600. Prince Maurits founded an engineering school at the University of Leiden for training as a fortification constructor.[5]
  • 1604. Hans Vredeman de Vries published the book Perspective in French at Beuckel Nieulandt in The Hague with illustrations by Henricus Hondius II.
  • 1607. From Vittorio Zonca (1568–1603) was published Novo Teatro di Machine et Edificii. Padova, Pietro Bertelli.
  • 1608. Leonhard Zubler (1565-1611) published Nova Geometrica Pyrobulia; Neuwe Geometrische Büchsenmeisterey. (see here)
  • 1609. John Blagrave (c. 1558-1612) published The Art of Dyalling in two Parts. London ; Nicholas Okes, 1609
  • 1609. Buonaiuto Lorini (c. 1540-1611) published Le fortificationi di Buonaiuto Lorini, nobile fiorentino
  • 1609. Leonhard Zubler (1565-1611) published Fabrica et usus instrumenti chorographici
  • 1613. Heinrich Zeising (-1613) published Theatrum Machinarum. Leipzig: Hennig Grossen der Jüngern.
  • 1637 "Rene Descartes set forth some of the basic principles of projective geometry in his book La Geometric Gerard Desargues (1593—1662)"[4]
  • 1647. Abraham Bosse published Maniere universelle de M. Desargues pour praticquer la Perspective, Paris 1647 about the work of Girard Desargues (1591–1661)
  • Late 17th c. "Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) extended the knowledge of projective geometry."[4]
  • 1673. Georg Andreas Böckler (1617-1687) published Theatrum Machinarum Novum
  • 17th c. First steps towards scientific documentation (Rovida (2012, v)) with William Gilbert (1544-1603), Gaspar Schott (1608-1666), Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Robert Hooke (1635-1703)
17th technical drawings
  • Fencing lessons in Faliede Bagijnkerk, Leyden around 1600
    Fencing lessons in Faliede Bagijnkerk, Leyden around 1600
  • Torchio tipografico by Zonca 1607.jpg
    Torchio tipografico by Zonca 1607.jpg
  • Map of Europe by Willem Blaeu, 1644
    Map of Europe by Willem Blaeu, 1644
  • Atlas Maior Front page by Joan Blaeu, 1645
    Atlas Maior Front page by Joan Blaeu, 1645
  • City centre of Gouda by Joan Blaeu,, ca. 1650
    City centre of Gouda by Joan Blaeu,, ca. 1650
  • Water pump put out a fire, Theatrum Machinarum Novum, 1661
    Water pump put out a fire, Theatrum Machinarum Novum, 1661
  • Guericke's Magdeburg hemispheres experiment by Gaspar Schott, 1672
    Guericke's Magdeburg hemispheres experiment by Gaspar Schott, 1672
  • Carte de France corrigée, d'après les travaux de Picard, La Hire et Cassini Ier., 1682
    Carte de France corrigée, d'après les travaux de Picard, La Hire et Cassini Ier., 1682
  • Fortified cities in Gelderland, Holland, Utrecht and Germany, 1684
    Fortified cities in Gelderland, Holland, Utrecht and Germany, 1684
  • Construction de Simon Stevin from Mallet's Les Travaux de Mars ou l'Art de la Guerre, 1696
    Construction de Simon Stevin from Mallet's Les Travaux de Mars ou l'Art de la Guerre, 1696
17th technical drawing theory and practice
17th technical drawing people


Quotes
  • Some of these are briefly recorded in the title - virtually synopsis - of a 17th century book: The Art of Dyalling in Two parts...
  • ... whilst few probably were literate enough to record their techniques. However, a number of books appeared in the 17th century - mostly French or translations from the French - written by more academic...
  • In XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries the evolution of mechanisms drawing went into the direction both of a more technical and understandable expression. A pictorial background is present yet, and in academic courses more attention is devoted to the mechanics and to mechanical design details.
A wide diffusion of mechanical means brought to the need of a wider and wider technological culture, and the development of information media suitable also for people who were neither experts neither engineers. Thus in the development of the of the Encyclopedie, D'Alembert and Diderot used graphical language which is a compromise between a technical layout and a pictorial description machines and mechanism.
  • Michela Cigola. "On the evolution of mechanisms drawing." Conference Paper IXth IFToMM World Congress, July 1995. p. 3193
  • The Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries saw a steady development in understanding of the link between mathematics and representation. French mathematicians contemporary with Descartes had already explored the fundamentals of projective geometry in the Seventeenth century. Girard Desargues, Philippe de la Hire and Blaise Pascal all contributed to the development. Desargues, who was a self-educated architect and engineer, saw clearly that his discoveries had potential for a variety of practical applications in engineering, painting and architecture when he wrote:
"I freely confess that I never had taste for study or research either in physics or geometry except in so far as they could serve as a means of arriving at some sort of knowledge of the proximate causes…for the good and convenience of life, in maintaining health, in the practice of some art…having observed that a good part of the arts is based on geometry, among others and cutting of stones in architecture, that of sun-dials, that of perspective in particular."
  • Ken Baynes (2009). Models of change: the impact of `designerly thinking' on people's lives and the environment: seminar 3 ... modelling and the Industrial Revolution. Loughborough : Loughborough University


18th century

[edit]
Timeline
18th technical drawings
18th technical drawing theory and practice
  • Central perspective, 1710
    Central perspective, 1710
  • Ichnographica Rustica by Stephen Switzer, 1718
    Ichnographica Rustica by Stephen Switzer, 1718
  • Table of Conics, Cyclopaedia, 1728
    Table of Conics, Cyclopaedia, 1728
18th technical drawing people
Quotes
  • Key figures in the Industrial Revolution – particularly inventors and engineers – are often depicted with rolls of maps and plans. Often they hold dividers or surveying instruments. Sometimes they are shown with scale models of a future device or structure. At the time, these were clearly recognised as the tools of their trade: innovative designers are shown along with the modelling tools that enabled them to carry out their work. How did these tools originate and why did they come to be so prominent in the iconography of the Industrial Revolution?
  • Ken Baynes (2009). Models of change: the impact of `designerly thinking' on people's lives and the environment: seminar 3 ... modelling and the Industrial Revolution. Loughborough : Loughborough University
Some examples
Comment : The tradition to picture inventors with drawings, models or drawing instruments didn't originate in the Industrial Revolution, but was already quite common in the 16th century. It is also some sort of painting convention to add some attributes to a portrait painting to refer to the persons accomplishments.
  • The appearance of engineering drawings as a fully-fledge medium for communication in the engineering industry coincided neatly-almost too neatly-with the establishment by Matthew Boulton and James Watt of the first factory in the world for the construction of stationary steam engines.
    • Ken Baynes, Francis Pugh, The Art of the Engineer, 1991. p. 35; cited in: Goodall (2008).
  • All over Europe, but particularly in France, the Eighteenth century saw the rapid development of a wide range of objective drawing and modelling techniques. It was part of the attempt by men of reason in the age of reason to catalogue, quantify and thus understand the natural and made worlds. This work found the height of its expression in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie...
The illustrations of Encyclopédie demonstrate a sophisticated graphic ‘language’ suitable for depicting and explaining machines and processes. They influence the style of technical publications even today. The Encyclopédie included sections on drawing and there is little doubt that these, together with the work as a whole, provided many of the elements to be found in the first true engineering drawings when they appeared in Britain at the end of the century.
  • Ken Baynes (2009). Models of change: the impact of `designerly thinking' on people's lives and the environment: seminar 3 ... modelling and the Industrial Revolution. Loughborough : Loughborough University

Gaspard Monge and descriptive geometry

[edit]
  • In order to raise the French nation from that position of dependence on foreign industry, in which it has continued up to the present time, it is necessary, in the first place, to direct the national education towards an acquaintance with matters which demand exactness, a study which hitherto has been totally neglected; and to accustom the hands of our artists to the management of tools of all kinds, which serve to give precision to workmanship, and for estimating its different degrees of excellence. Then the consumer, appreciating exactness, will be able to insist upon it in the different kinds of workmanship, and to fix its proper price; and our artists, accustomed to it from an early age, will be capable of obtaining it.
  • This art has two principal objects.
The first is to represent with exactness upon drawings which have only two dimensions, such objects as have three, and which are susceptible of rigorous definition.
Under this aspect it is a language necessary to a man of genius, who conceives a project, to those who are obliged to direct the execution of it, and finally, to the artists who are obliged them selves to execute the different parts of it.
The second object of Descriptive Geometry is to deduce from the exact description of bodies all which follows necessarily from their forms and respective positions. In this sense, it is a means of investigating truth; it perpetually offers examples of passing from the known to the unknown; and since it is always applied to objects the most obvious, it is necessary to introduce it into the plan of a national education.
  • Among the different applications which can be made of descriptive geometry there are two which are remarkable, both by their generality and by the ingenuity which attaches to them; these are the constructions of Perspective and the rigorous determination of Shadows in drawings. These two parts can be considered as the complement of the art of graphically describing objects.
    • Gaspard Monge, Géométrie descriptive, 1799. Transl. ??; As cited in: Booker (1963, 140)
  • Monge's system of drawing was of such great practical value that the French military employed it to expedite the design of military fortifications. Orthographic projection was first taught at the French military school at Mezieres and was subsequently introduced in this country at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, by Claude Crozet, one of Monge's students.
Although Gaspard Monge is rightfully recognized as the pioneer, his achievements were not the fruits of his own genius alone. He undoubtedly built upon the foundations laid by his predecessors in applied mathematics and geometry. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) expanded the concept of geometry, and in 1637 Rene Descartes set forth some of the basic principles of projective geometry in his book La Geometric Gerard Desargues (1593—1662) and Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) extended the knowledge of projective geometry. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) formulated the principles of mechanics; with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz he developed the calculus. Monge's celebrated contemporaries included such geometers and mathematicians as Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813), Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827), Adrien Marie Legendre (1752-1833), and Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855).
  • Eugene G. Paré (1959), Engineering Drawing, p. 1-2
  • Gaspard Monge, the eighteenth-century inventor of descriptive geometry, is often cited as having introduced orthographic projection to engineering drawing. However, the nineteenth-century development of three-view orthographic projection was not a definitive method handed down from above but a collaborative effort of teachers, textbook writers, and anonymous draftsmen in Europe and America. Monge's book on descriptive geometry, published in 1795. dealt with orthographic projections, but a reader would find firm guidance for only two views: plan and elevation. Booker found that Monge's book had little influence on drafting practice in Great Britain or the United States and Yves Deforge, author of a French history of technical drawing, states flatly that "technical drawing is not the child of descriptive geometry."
    • Ferguson (1992, p. 83)
  • Gaspard Monge is credited with refining drawing techniques in 1780, so that the correct size and shape of any item could be represented in a drawing... Mr Monge assembled and clarified the geometric means which can be used to deduce the true length and angle of any graphic element, of any part, drawn by the rules of orthogonal projection. That is, by using one or more two-dimensional drawings, all three-dimensional specification of an item can be extracted. The accuracy of the information so obtained is limited by the accuracy of the line work and the stability of the material on which the work is done. At the time, Gaspar Monge’s work was seen to be of such significance that it was kept a secret from the British. Knowing the actual shape of any component is of course absolutely necessary for its manufacture.
    • Andrei Lozzi, "History of Mechanical Design and Machine Drawing in the School of AMME," at web.aeromech.usyd.edu.au, accessed 12.2014.

Modern technical drawing (quotes)

[edit]

19th century

[edit]
Timeline
19th century technical drawings
  • A Treatise on the Steam Engine, 1827
    A Treatise on the Steam Engine, 1827
19th century technical drawing theory and practice
  • Instruments for making perspective drawings by John Farey Jr., 1814
    Instruments for making perspective drawings by John Farey Jr., 1814
  • Farey's Elliptograph, 1825
    Farey's Elliptograph, 1825
  • 1879
    1879
  • 1893
    1893
  • 1896
    1896
  • Late 19th c.
    Late 19th c.
19th century technical drawing people
General quotes
  • In the early part of the 19th century most engineering drawings were produced by engineers or craftsmen. By the middle of the century this had changed and there was also a considerable population of draughtsmen. They were not all of a likeness, however. Some were virtually engineers — equivalent to the modern designer-draughtsman; some were production experts, adept at redesigning functional parts for optimum manufacture; but a very much larger group were somewhat equivalent to what we would call tracers, although nevertheless virtually artists. Whilst this was just before the time when blue-prints came into use, engineering had expanded to the stage where single copies of drawings were unrealistic. Besides making copies, these “artists” made many very finely finished drawings of a type unfamiliar to most of us today.
  • The ability to represent and communicate information about the design and manufacturing of artifacts is at the heart of the modern manufacturing enterprise. Detailed geometric drawings specifying construction of buildings were already in use in ancient Greece [16]. Without the ability to describe and communicate the shape of interchangeable components, manufacturing was largely confined to low-volume and inaccessible artisan activity [6]. The need to describe and communicate the shape of interchangeable mechanical components in assemblies, tooling, and fixtures, as well as the methods of their manufacturing, has led to the wide adaption of standard engineering drawing practices in support of mass production [21].
  • Into the late 1800s and early 1900s, inventors, engineers, and builders worked on each product on a one-of-a-kind basis. Manufactures produced parts from hand sketches or hand drawings on blackboards. American engineer and inventor Coleman Sellers, in the manufacture of fire engines, had blackboards with full-size drawings of parts. Blacksmiths formed parts and compared them to the shapes on the blackboards. Coleman Sellers son, George Sellers, recalls lying on his belly using his arms as a radius for curves as his father stood over him directing changes in the sketches until the drawings were satisfactory. Most designs used through the 1800s began as a hand sketches of the objects to be built. Workers then converted the sketches into wooden models from which patterns were constructed. Some companies followed this practice well into the twentieth century.
Drawing education
  • The United States Military Academy (USMA) became a pioneering center for graphics in the United States. Christian Zoeller brought engineering drawing classes to the Academy in 1807. Crozet, introduced descriptive geometry to the Academy in 1816. By 1821 he translated Monge’s work into English. Crozet is also credited with introducing the blackboard and chalk for the teaching of graphics.
    • La Verne Abe Harris & Frederick Meyers. "Engineering Design Graphics: Into the 21st Century," Engineering Design Graphics Journal, Autumn 2007.
Projective geometry and orthographic projection
  • Monge's system of drawing was of such great practical value that the French military employed it to expedite the design of military fortifications. Orthographic projection was first taught at the French military school at Mezieres and was subsequently introduced in this country at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, by Claude Crozet, one of Monge's students.
    • Eugene G. Paré (1959), Engineering Drawing, p. 1-2
Blue print process
  • Two major improvements stimulated graphics in America in the latter half of the 19th century: the Alteneder family established a factory in Philadelphia for manufacturing drawing instruments and blueprinting was introduced at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. High-quality drafting instruments no longer had to be imported, and the “art” of drafting rapidly disappeared. Before 1876 if additional copies of a drawing were needed, the drafter produced each drawing individually. After 1876 only one “master copy” was needed and as many blueprints as needed could be made in hours (Land, 1976).
    • Harris, La Verne Abe, and Frederick Meyers. "Engineering design graphics: Into the 21st century." Engineering Design Graphics Journal 71.3 (2009).
  • Before the industrial revolution it was common place for workmen to work from prototypes. With the coming of the steam age it became clear that standard parts and components would be required to allow mass manufacture. Creating these standards became possible in 1840 when the blue print process was invented. For the first time many fabricators could work to identical drawings.
Emerge of discipline of engineering graphics with general books & theory on drawing

20th century

[edit]
Timeline
  • 1905. Charles Laban Adams (1856-1914) published Mechanical drawing; technique and working methods, for technical students.
  • 1906. Gardner Chace Anthony (1856-1937) published Machine drawing, Boston : D. C. Heath.
  • 1913- General theory on drawing
  • 1913. George Ellis published Modern technical drawing
  • 1936. Frederick Ernest Giesecke (1869-1953) et al. published the classic Technical drawing, by Frederick E. Giesecke, Alva Mitchell [and] Henry C. Spencer,at New York, The Macmillan company, which will go through 8 editions, last in 2003.
  • 1960. Franz Maria Feldhaus published "Geschichte des technischen Zeichnens," translated into "The History of Technical Drawing" (1963).
  • 1962. Henry Cecil Spencer (1903-1972) published Basic technical drawing. New York : Macmillan.
  • 1963. Peter Jeffrey Booker published A history of engineering drawing.
  • 1972. Earl D. Black published Engineering and technical drawing. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co.
  • 1977. Eugene S. Ferguson published Engineering and the Mind's Eye.
  • 1980. Norman Stirling published Technical drawing : an introduction, New York : Van Nostrand Reinhold.
  • 1985. Samuel Y. Edgerton (b. 1926) published the article "The Renaissance Development of the Scientific Illustration."
  • 1991. Ken Baynes and Francis Pugh published The Art of the Engineer.
  • 1996. Gary Robert Bertoline and Eric N. Wiebe published first edition of Fundamentals of Graphics Communication.

Mayor authors on technical drawing: Gardner Chace Anthony (1856-1937); Frederick Ernest Giesecke (1869-1953); Henry Cecil Spencer (1903-1972)

20th century technical drawings
20th century technical drawing theory and practice
20th century technical drawing people


Drawing Standardisation
  • In 1901 the Institutions of Civil Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Naval Architects and the Iron and Steel Institute created a committee, to standardize iron and steel sections for bridges, railways and shipping. It subsequently extended its standardization work and became the British Engineering Standards Association in 1918, adopting the name British Standards Institution in 1931 after receiving its Royal Charter in 1929.
    The first British Standard for Engineering Drawing Office Practice ‘BS 308’ was published in September 1927 and only contained 14 clauses and five illustrations. It was printed on A5 sheets of paper and third angle projection was used.
CAD
  • With the explosion of personal computer based computer-aided drafting software, such as AutoCAD and VersaCAD, in the middle 1980’s, most engineering graphics approaches changed from traditional board drafting to computer-aided drafting. Within the computer-aided design (CAD) system evolution of the early 1990’s, increased capabilities for three-dimensional (3D) modeling presented new opportunities for graphics educators to implement design and prototyping principles.
  • During the 1970s and 1980s, in a major technological paradigm shift, solid modeling emerged in the attempt to create an informationally complete model of a manufactured shape that could be used throughout the manufacturing enterprise and support engineering activities throughout the product life cycle. The pioneers of solid modeling also recognized that the notion of informational completeness is not absolute, but is relative to assumed or postulated mathematical models. The latter, in turn, are based on target class of physical artifacts and processes. The instantiation of these techniques in data structures, algorithm and interfaces was a triumph of software industry during this time. Many practical issues related to the underlying representations (constructive solid geometry, non-uniform rational b-splines, winged edge and half edge data structures) and mathematical limits of digital computing (floating point accuracy, error stack up, robustness) were, for most practical purposes, overcome and the resulting companies constitute a $10B/year industry.
Mental status of drawing

Works (Quotes)

[edit]

History of drawing, by Booker 1963

[edit]

Peter Jeffrey Booker. A history of engineering drawing. (1963).

  • In its narrowest sense engineering drawing is a language used for communication. However, languages in generally are not only useful for communication; they play an inherent part in our very thinking, for we tend to think in terms of the languages we know. Drawing is of this nature, and he who can draw can think of, and deal with, many things and problems which another man cannot.
    • p.xv; as cited in: Goodall (2008)
  • There was shadows cast by the sun’s rays which were the same size as the object when thrown upon a surface parallel to the object; and there were shadows cast by a candle, effectively a point source of light with diverging rays, giving shadows larger than the objects illuminated. The two lighting systems represent the fundamental types of projection – parallel and conical.
    • p. 3; section: "Introducing Shadows and Projection."
  • The problem in general terms is one of how to represent on paper an object which has shape in more than one‭ '‬direction‭'‬.‭ ‬There are two fundamental answers to this problem‭; ‬one is to retain the idea of true shape and exhibit the many shapes in an object by using a number of drawings of the object as seen from various directions‭; ‬the other is to keep the idea of‭ '‬one object,‭ ‬one drawing‭'‬,‭ ‬but transform its real shapes into apparent shapes.
    • p. 15; cited in: Goodall (2008).
  • Perspective is the art which views any object through something transparent, upon which the penetrating visual rays to define it.
Scenography or Painting is the representation of the appearance of the object on a plane which we call the section.
Iconography is the picture on the ground plane, or the level, on which the scenographic figure is naturally standing, or thus Iconography is the representation of the base, or plane of somebody in the section when it is parallel with or equidistant from the plane.
Orthography is the picture of the front or side of a building, edifice or body, which is also called the profile, or thus Orthography is the picture of the side of the edifice directly opposite the eye or the section, in such manner that two surfaces, that of the section and that of the object, are parallel and equidistant to one another, which representation is also called the profile.
Comment: It is questionable if this quote is actually present in Brooker (1963)
  • Although a great deal of astronomical knowledge was available to the ancients, this problem was not properly solved in Europe until about the 16th century. Sun-dais of a sort had been made for a thousasd years before this date and, in the 1st century B.C. Vitruvius gave instructions for making sun-dail using the...
    • p. 50
  • Some of these are briefly recorded in the title - virtually synopsis - of a 17th century book: The Art of Dyalling in Two parts...
    • p. 51
  • whilst few probably were literate enough to record their techniques. However, a number of books appeared in the 17th century - mostly French or translations from the French - written by more academic...
    • p. 61
  • British books on fortifications in the 18th century are mere....
    • p. 72
  • Whilst multiplane orthographic views are essential for design purposes and are the only realistic way in which shape can be recorded for engineering purposes, the interpretation of such drawings, in which one object is represented by a number of pictures, is a difficult matter, sometimes even for those with considerable experience.
    • p. 116, cited in: Goodall (2008).
  • In the early part of the 19th century most engineering drawings were produced by engineers or craftsmen. By the middle of the century this had changed and there was also a considerable population of draughtsmen. They were not all of a likeness, however. Some were virtually engineers — equivalent to the modern designer-draughtsman; some were production experts, adept at redesigning functional parts for optimum manufacture; but a very much larger group were somewhat equivalent to what we would call tracers, although nevertheless virtually artists. Whilst this was just before the time when blue-prints came into use, engineering had expanded to the stage where single copies of drawings were unrealistic. Besides making copies, these “artists” made many very finely finished drawings of a type unfamiliar to most of us today.
    • p. 133; as cited in: David Tomas (2004). Beyond the Image Machine: A History of Visual Technologies. p. 211.
  • Even in an engineering department, the objective of the operation is mental development.
    • (Booker, 1963, p. 488) as cited in: Martin Kenney, ‎David Mowery (2014). Public Universities and Regional Growth. p. 133
  • In the introduction to Géométrie descriptive, Monge said: 'Among the different applications which can be made of descriptive geometry there are two which are remarkable, both by their generality and by the ingenuity which attaches to them; these are the constructions of Perspective and the rigorous determination of Shadows in drawings. These two parts can be considered as the complement of the art of graphically describing objects."
    • p. 140
About this work
  • Though engineering drawing serves a variety of purposes, such as are listed by the author, it is as a means of communication that P. J. Booker is mostly concerned with engineering drawing in this history, and in particular of communication via the representation of three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface; a means of communication, that is between the designer and constructor, since this particular communication must convey not only the qualitative aspects of the design but also provide the detailed dimensions that are ultimately necessary before the design be realized.
    • D. Chilton. "A History of Engineering Drawing by P. J. Booker." in: Technology and Culture. Vol. 6, No. 1, Museums of Technology (Winter, 1965), pp. 128-130

Engineering and the Mind's Eye by Ferguson (1977/1992)

[edit]

Eugene S. Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind's Eye, 1977; 1992.

  • If we are to understand the nature of engineering, we must appreciate this important although unnoticed mode of thought. It has been nonverbal thinking, by and large, that fixed the outlines and filled in the details of our material surroundings. In their innumerable choices and decisions, technologists have determined the kind of world we live in, in a physical sense. Pyramids, cathedrals, and rockets exist not because of geometry, theory of structures, or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture -- literally visions -- in the minds of those who conceived them.
    • p. xi; Preface (partly (or scrambled) cited in: Goodall (2008)
  • This book attempts to clarify the nature and significance of nonverbal thought in engineering. It argues that modern engineering - that is, the engineering of the last 500 years - has depended heavily and continuously on nonverbal learning and nonverbal understanding...
    • p. xi; Preface
  • Until the second half of the twentieth century, engineering schools taught an understanding of engineering drawing by teaching how to make such drawings... Since World War II, the dominant trend in engineering has been away from knowledge that cannot be expressed as mathematical relationship...
    • p. xi-xii; Preface
  • Since World War II, the dominant trend in engineering has been away from knowledge that cannot be expressed as mathematical relationships. The art of engineering has been pushed aside in favor of the "engineering sciences," which are higher in status and easier to teach. The underlying argument of this book is that an engineering education that ignores its rich heritage of nonverbal learning will produce graduates who are dangerously ignorant of the myriad subtle ways in which the real world differs from the mathematical world their professors teach them.
    • Preface
  • Great advances in our abilities to convey visual information began during the Renaissance. A series of fundamental graphic inventions, including printing, linear perspective, and projective geometry, greatly enhanced the precision with which a vision in one person's mind might be conveyed by material means — drawings — across space and time to another person's mind.
    • p. 75 : Chapter 4 Tools of Visualization
  • The most significant graphic invention of the Renaissance was pictorial perspective (also called linear perspective), which produced a qualitative change in the ease with which a visual image in one mind could be conveyed to another mind. Since their invention in the fifteenth century, perspective drawings have provided a uniform convention for pictorial representations of three-dimensional objects, Such drawings can be interpreted with little effort by most viewers.
    • p. 77
  • The first geometrically constructed perspective drawings of the Renaissance were produced around 1425 by Brunelleschi. Although his drawings have not survived, the rules he followed were codified and published by Leon Battista Alberti about ten years later.
    • p. 81
  • Gaspard Monge, the eighteenth-century inventor of descriptive geometry, is often cited as having introduced orthographic projection to engineering drawing. However, the nineteenth-century development of three-view orthographic projection was not a definitive method handed down from above but a collaborative effort of teachers, textbook writers, and anonymous draftsmen in Europe and America. Monge's book on descriptive geometry, published in 1795. dealt with orthographic projections, but a reader would find firm guidance for only two views: plan and elevation. Booker found that Monge's book had little influence on drafting practice in Great Britain or the United States and Yves Deforge, author of a French history of technical drawing, states flatly that "technical drawing is not the child of descriptive geometry."
    • Ferguson (1992, p. 83)
About this work
  • For a general history of technical drawing and its cognitive bearing on engineering, see Eugene Ferguson, Engineering and the Mind's Eye (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 87—96.
    • Ken Alder (2014) Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815. p. 369

The art of the engineer, by Baynes and Pugh, 1981

[edit]

Ken Baynes & Francis Pugh, The Art of the Engineer, 1991.

  • Engineering drawing, though it had its roots in scientific and technical illustration at the time of the Renaissance and in architectural and naval draughtsmanship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was essentially a product of the Industrial Revolution. The numerous drawings reproduced in this book offer a representative selection of the work produced for the transport industries – ships, railway engines, motor-cars, aeroplanes – during the past two hundred years. Many are superb examples of draughtsmanship, and a number are equal in quality to the best drawings of any kind. The illustrations can be looked at in two complementary ways. The drawings may be enjoyed for their visual quality alone, but it is also important to grasp their significance for the design and production processes to which they relate. As all the drawings were originally produced for a specific purpose, their place in the story of engineering needs to be understood. In their text and detailed captions, the authors place each drawing in its context and describe the development of the skills of draughtsmanship as they interacted with the entrepreneurial demands of rapidly developing technology.
  • Introduction This book reproduces and discusses a selection of mechanical engineering drawings made lor the transport industries between the late sixteenth century and the present day. It contains many- superb examples of draughtsmanship, a number of which are equal in quality to the finest drawings of any kind.
    • p. 5
  • The body or work that can properly be described as 'engineering drawing is far from homogenous. It ranges from the slightest sketches to elaborate and carefully coloured sets of presentation drawings. This variety is functional. It relates to the differing demands of, for example, initial design, where ideas are not yet resolved, to production where exact and complete instructions are required. A basic 'typology' of drawings appears to have emerged early in the development of the engineering industry and then to have continued through to the present day. Here are some categories that seem useful...
    • p. 14
  • 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....
  • p. 14
  • 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 relalively small scale.
  • p. 14
  • 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.
  • p. 14
  • 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...
  • p. 14-15
  • 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.
  • p. 15
  • The appearance of engineering drawings as a fully-fledge medium for communication in the engineering industry coincided neatly-almost too neatly-with the establishment by Matthew Boulton and James Watt of the first factory in the world for the construction of stationary steam engines.
    • p. 35, cited in: Goodall (2008).
  • At the beginning of the twentieth century, colour was still in widespread use in engineering drawings. By 1914 this practice has virtually ceased. It is unlikely, therefore, that the Great War and the pressure it exerted on drawing-office staff were solely to blame. Instead, there was a change in attitude, perhaps an increasing awareness of commercial imperatives. Before it vanished, colour was being used in at least three different ways: to indicate materials; to differentiate between flows within a system; and simply as embellishment.
    • p. 175, cited in: Goodall (2008).
  1. ^ Fragment pictured in: Corinna Rossi. Architecture and Mathematics in Ancient Egypt. Springer. 2004. p. 116
  2. ^ Ostrakon MMA 22.3.30 online at mentuhotep.de, accessed 07-06-2017
  3. ^ a b c R. S. Hartenberg. "Geschichte des Technischen Zeichnens by Franz Maria Feldhaus; Edmund Schruff." in: Technology and Culture Vol. 2, No. 1 (Winter, 1961), pp. 45-49
  4. ^ a b c d e Cite error: The named reference EGP 1959 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ William E. Burns (2001), The Scientific Revolution: An Encyclopedia. p. 309
  6. ^ Baynes & Pugh (1991, 35)
  7. ^ B.S. Dhillon. Advanced Design Concepts for Engineers. CRC Press, 24 mrt. 1998. p. 1
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