In the nineteenth century mechanical drawings presented some of the most distinctive and widespread visual statements of the ‘machine dreams’ of industrialization. Distinctive styles of engineering drawing, well known from the work of various celebrated figures such as John Smeaton or James Watt, emerged within the period of ‘industrial enlightenment’ around 1800. Engineers developed various spheres of operation: in the two-dimensional world of paper where they presented ‘engineering’ in texts and images, as well as in the three-dimensional world of material structures, professional rivalry, and factory organization. Machine drawing displayed new and specific professional skills that were clearly separated from artistic and even design practices.

The NMS, founded as the Industrial Museum of Scotland in 1857, was specifically conceived by its first Director George Wilson as ‘a castle stored with the ammunition and weapons of commercial warfare’. Wilson valued his stores of drawing equipment, for as he explained, all kinds of drawing instruments, from lowly pens, pencils and brushes through to untested newly invented devices were important weapons in the armoury of ‘Dynamical Industrial Art’.

In this lecture, I aim to introduce various distinctive aspects of engineering drawing. Firstly I will discuss how engineers used drawing as a specialist means of communication to acquire, consolidate and defend their professional status in the nineteenth century, with close focus on the interaction of styles, materials and means of mark making. Second, through a consideration of the development of blueprinting, I will discuss the contractual and archival functions of engineering drawings. Finally, I will consider the changing relationship between engineers and draughtsmen as industrial workers during the nineteenth century and associated changes in the perceived status of engineering drawing that still reverberate in visual studies today.