In parallel with public displays and exhibitions that created a ‘meaning for machines’ in Britain, engineers and draughtsmen also worked to develop a visual discourse of mechanical representations on paper in the context of publications dedicated to the ‘useful arts’. In this self-reflective world, ‘machine drawing’ was shaped quite literally through the invention and use of a range of drawing aids such as elliptographs, ruling machines and other devices. In publications such as the Transactions of the Society of Arts, or the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, contributors used drawing strategies to create authority for the productive ability of engineering and mechanical science. In their commentaries and in the images they made, engineers and instrument makers such as Joseph Clement, John Farey, Edmund Turrell, or George Adams, Jr. announced that using mechanical aids was a professional skill, marking a clear separation from artistic and even design practice, where such aids would only be called on covertly. In combination with hands-on observation of historical drawing machines in use, I argue that mechanical drawing in Britain at around 1800 gained authority with viewers as the sign or marker of an often laborious embodied process. In considering drawing as visual expression, a material artefact, and embodied practice, inventors, instrument makers and draughtsmen used two strategies to promote this engagement; first, by conjuring the authority of ‘self-registering technology’, and second, by asserting the personal and tacit expertise of the skilled craft operator. These specialized inscriptions on paper functioned as a promise to deliver the goods in the material world.