Scientific American, Vol. 5, No. 40 (1850)
Scientific American volume 5, number 40, published in 1850, is a weekly American periodical of mechanical and inventive news for inventors, mechanics and general readers. Its pages carry woodcut engravings of new machines with captions naming their inventors, and the three shown here are a printing press, an anti-crank engine and a corn planter. A designer can take from them the crisp, hatched line work of nineteenth-century mechanical drawing, with dense cross-hatching for shadow and wood grain and clean outlines for metal parts.
