Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the year ..
A government patent office annual report from 1849, published in Washington by the printers to the House of Representatives for the United States Patent Office. Its page of engraved machinery drawings, labelled Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, shows mechanical devices in plan and elevation with belts, pulleys and frames. A designer could take from it the clean linear technical diagram style of mid-nineteenth-century engineering, with its precise line work and figure labels.
