Scientific American, Vol. 32, No. 16 (1875)
Scientific American, volume 32, number 16, is a weekly American periodical of 1875 that reported new inventions and industrial technology to a general readership of engineers, mechanics and inventors. Its pages pair dense columns of text with precise wood-engraved diagrams of apparatus, so the pictures here show instruments, machines and mechanisms drawn in clean outline with figure numbers and labelled parts. A designer might take from them the crisp hatched shading and mechanical line work typical of nineteenth-century technical illustration.














