Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the year ..
An annual government report issued by the United States Patent Office in Washington in 1849, printed for the House of Representatives and listing patents granted that year. The pictures are numbered patent drawings of mechanical devices, with lettered parts and figure labels, showing a machine built around a spool or bobbin with a clamp and a separate detail view. A designer could take from them the plain, technical line-drawing style of 19th-century engineering diagrams, with its figure numbers, leader letters and hatched outlines.
