Sewell Visions of Labor Illustrations of the Mechanical Arts

In Notre-Matriarch de Paris, Victor Hugo (1802–1885) wrote, "the book will kill the edifice." Spoken by Archdeacon Claude Frollo, this phrase signified the view that the Renaissance was "that setting sun we mistake for a dawn."¹ Understood as a revolution in tectonics away from the organic and toward the classical, the Renaissance had separated sculpture, painting, and architecture—carved and parceled them out from what was formerly a single edifice of Gothic construction. The mechanism? Press. Whereas Gothic architecture had reflected and affirmed the unabridged intellectual investment of society, the various arts and sciences were at present contained in books.

Information technology is no coincidence that this account emerged in the nineteenth century, an era of rapid industrial change accompanied by a revival of the Gothic. Despite the function Hugo accorded to the printing press, the product and circulation of early on modern "theatres of machines" had not divided mind from hand in production. These phenomena were efforts of his own time. The projection of distilling design from fabrication—and placing pattern prior to fabrication, instead of in ongoing dialogue with information technology—developed in the standardizing armed forces engineering of the French Revolution and culminated in the scientific management movements of the fin-de-siècle.^two

One encounters conflicting historical accounts of the role technical print culture played in the social transformation of industry. On 1 hand, economic historians have argued that burgeoning productive exchange betwixt savants and fabricants, personally and inside technical impress culture, gave rise to an "industrial enlightenment" in the belatedly eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.^three On the other hand, social historians have described how the Encyclopédie, brought out between 1751 and 1772 by Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717–1783), aimed to unveil crafts work processes to an emergent conservative public, thereby appropriating noesis and subjecting it to a rationalizing, managerial gaze.^iv

This interpretative puzzler becomes all the more puzzling for the 1830s, when innovations in printing such as stereotyping and lithography made mechanics manuals equipped with numerous tables and drawings cheaply accessible. A subscription to the Encyclopédie would accept price 240 livres—the almanac wages of a contemporary Parisian workman.⁵ A century later, in 1870, American publishers sold myriad works on automobile design and construction costing between one and eight dollars.⁶ Nineteenth-century mechanics read manuals, scrawled computational marginalia in them, and sometimes authored them. How are we to understand shifting forms of knowledge and workplace power during the early on nineteenth century, when mechanics experienced the fallout of and propelled change inside machine design and manufacture?

In revolutionary France, engineers and mathematicians had pursued 2 master techniques of reformulating and reforming artisan work processes. I road lay in the attempt of artillery officer Lt. General Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval (1715–1789) to accomplish interchangeable parts in the mass production of arms via locks, jigs, and templates.⁷ The other path led through the efforts of Gaspard Monge (1746–1818), a mathematician and instructor at the Ecole Polytechnique, to compel artisans to produce standardized artifacts via depictive techniques based on descriptive geometry.⁸ Over the course of the nineteenth century, Monge's system of projection would become the ascendant drafting norm, every bit controlling power shifted from shop floor to drafting room.

Monge'due south descriptive geometry contributed to this process by solving the problem of depicting the position of a betoken in infinite and from in that location generating lines and curves, enabling ane to find the intersections of two surfaces. The master advantage offered by a graphical method for solving such problems was that truthful lengths for parts could be easily inferred, preserved, and read by operatives. Surfaces whose lines of intersection with the two perpendicular planes, or "traces," could be comprehensively shown with ease included spheres and cylinders. These forms lay at the cadre of steam and other industrial technologies.

Memorializing Monge upon his decease in 1818, Barnabé Brisson (1777–1828) argued that Monge had recovered, revealed, and systematized crafts work processes rather than upending them entirely. Brisson wrote, "it was mainly in practical research in the arts, and in applications immediately practiced for the society, that Monge found pleasure in consecrating mental force … with which nature had endowed him."⁹ Co-ordinate to Brisson, this began as a distinctly inductive process, echoing the transcription undertaken by the authors of Encyclopédie. Monge "nerveless the exact processes, discovered and put into exercise by obscure men, who, from fourth dimension immemorial, proficient them and transmitted them in secrecy."¹⁰ Then he "perfected them, extended them, and coordinated them in a full general theory," forming this "science into descriptive geometry."¹¹ Rather than portray this procedure as cribbing, Brisson implied that Monge had parlayed his gift for envisioning three-dimensional structures in his "mind'southward eye" into a span between scientific report and the artisan working classes.

Historians of applied science cartoon have cast uncertainty on whether Monge's descriptive geometry, disseminated directly through print, gave rise to the drafting norms that would predominate globally in the afterward nineteenth century and beyond.¹² In the antebellum Usa, ii types of institutions propagated drafting practices, forth with a rising form of publishers such as John Wiley (1808–1891) in New York and Henry Carey Baird (1825–1912) in Philadelphia: mechanics institutes and military academies.

Drawing constituted an essential role of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bourgeois habitus in Europe and the United States.¹³ "Acquit of life" guides aimed at apprentices and immature mechanics (a term encompassing a wide multifariousness of trades) extolled the virtue of attending lectures at mechanics institutes, using their libraries, and learning to describe.¹⁴ Mechanics Institutes held numerous French mechanical, astronomical, chemical, concrete, mathematical, meteorological, and mineralogical texts, including works on descriptive geometry.¹⁵

Title page of Gaspard Monge, Géométrie descriptive (Paris: Bachelier, 1827).

Analogy from Gaspard Monge, Géométrie descriptive (Paris: Bachelier, 1827).

The Moral and the Mechanical: Frontispiece of a "conduct of life" manual by John Frost, The Young Mechanic (Auburn, NY: Alden & Markham, 1848)

"Acquit of life" guides promoted a connection between learning to describe and cultivating an individualist (rather than social) republicanism. Authorial advocates of this ethos honored the nobility of labor and prized mental cocky-management, but they aimed to steer readers away from the Freemasonry, Freethinking, and Workingmen'due south Party politics popular among journeymen.

Drafting according to the precepts of Monge's descriptive geometry crossed the Atlantic via Westward Indicate. Modeled afterwards the Ecole Polytechnique, West Betoken employed French professors such equally Claudius Crozet (1789–1864), purchased hundreds of textbooks from France, and developed a curriculum centered around applied science and mathematics that emphasized visual reasoning, whether to build fortifications or effectively survey a field, from the tardily 1810s and 1820s onward.¹⁶

Championship folio of Charles Davies, Treatise on Shades and Shadows, and Linear Perspective (New York: Wiley & Putnam, Collins, Reese, & Co., 1838)

Shadows and projections of a cube in Charles Davies'south Treatise on Shades and Shadows (New York: Wiley & Putnam, Collins, Reese, & Co., 1838).

Sections of a cone in Charles Davies'due south Treatise on Shades and Shadows (New York: Wiley & Putnam, Collins, Reese, & Co., 1838).

In 1852, Dennis Hart Mahan (1802–1871), a military machine theorist and ceremonious technology professor at West Point from the 1820s to the 1870s, published a guide to "industrial drawing" for non-cadets. He explained that the manual had emerged out of having to "direct workmen in constructing models from drawings" and discovering that, "though in other respects very intelligent and conversant with the resource of their art, they were, with but rare exception, almost entirely ignorant of the art of rendering their ideas past a cartoon, and every bit so in comprehending the ideas of others, however clearly expressed, when laid before them in this way." ¹⁷ Mahan attributed lost time and frequent errors to this visual illiteracy, deploring that he was "obliged literally to stand up at the workman's side and say 'cut hither,' 'saw there.'" Consequently, Mahan undertook to innovate drafting into schools among the "intelligent and more advanced boys who would before long begin their apprenticeship to some trade."¹⁸

He began with the school attached to the Due west Bespeak Foundry Company, whose president provided models and implements for workers' sons to learn to draw. Mahan followed the methods proposed by graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique, such as Charles Dupin's De la Géométrie et de la Mécanique appliqués aux Arts et Metiers en Faveur de la Classe Industrielle.  He praised the elite polytechniciens for having "brought their knowledge down to the level of the working classes, and those who had fourth dimension simply for elementary acquirements."^xix Mahan asserted, "in that location is no person, whatever his profession, but at times has need of drawing … to render his ideas perfectly intelligible to others." ^xx Beyond the examples he accounted obvious—engineers carpenters, masons, and mechanicians—Mahan claimed that industrial drawing was "to the artisan of every grade" what "writing is to all."²¹

Dennis Hart Mahan, Industrial Drawing (New York: Wiley, 1852).

Illustration from Dennis Hart Mahan, Industrial Cartoon (New York: Wiley, 1852).

Illustration from Dennis Hart Mahan, Industrial Drawing (New York: Wiley, 1852)

Mahan inscribed a stardom betwixt drafting pedagogy for officers and for craftsmen. His textbook and classroom class for the latter did not seek to "bargain with abstract reasoning on which it is based," simply rather planned to "furnish the nigh simple ways of mastering its difficulties and applying information technology to the many practical purposes of which it is susceptible." He taught industrial drawing with an appliance to simulate the perpendicular planes of Monge'southward descriptive geometry, to be built "by an ordinary carpenter and turner." Mahan posited class-specific versions of industrial cartoon. Mahan observed that "as in other handicraft operations, any could exist gathered by the eye the manus was constitute apt at once to execute." ²² Whether or not the origins of Monge's method lay in the ateliers, it is striking that Mahan referred to drafting based on descriptive geometry every bit a handicraft operation. He had attempted to make "industrial drawing" into a mod conception of merely that.

Historians of applied science have often noted the function of the "mind's centre" when individual inventors envision ways of power conveyance.²³ Tracing the history of drafting with mechanics manuals invites usa to understand learning to draw as a complex social process, wherein democratized access to and popular participation in reformatting technical knowhow lived alongside new forms of stratification and dependency. This paradox finds its echo in our time.

Liat Spiro is a PhD candidate in the Department of History, Harvard University. Her Twitter handle is @LiatSpiro.

Suggested Commendation: Liat Spiro, "The Book Will Kill the Edifice? Mechanics Manuals and Learning to Describe in the Early and Mid-Nineteenth Century," History of Knowledge, May 29, 2018, https://historyofknowledge.internet/2018/05/29/mechanics-manuals/.

smithcandect.blogspot.com

Source: https://historyofknowledge.net/2018/05/29/mechanics-manuals/

Share this post