The pantograph is a drawing instrument used to enlarge and
reduce figures. It was devised by the
Jesuit astronomer and mathematician Christoph Scheiner in 1603 and described by
him in a 1631 publication. Scheiner’s instrument was of wood. Pantographs were
soon made elsewhere in Europe of brass. French makers also introduced ebony
forms of the instrument.
As the collections at Harvard University demonstrate,
pantographs sold in the United States by the late eighteenth century. The
examples in the NMAH collections date from the nineteenth and twentieth
century. They were imported from Great Britain, France, Germany, and
Switzerland – with a few patented and sold in the U.S.
The principle of the pantograph was adopted in machines used
by printers to enlarge and reduce the size of etchings. It also found
applications in textile design and in an early device used to punch cards for
statistical tabulation. Devices in roughly the shape of a pantograph have been
used on trains since th nineteenth century.
This object group does not attempt to describe these applications,
although searching the NMAH collections database for the term “pantograph”
brings up some relevant objects.
References:
Christoph Scheiner, Pantographice
seu ars delineandi (Rome, 1631).
There is a copy of this volume in the Smithsonian’s Dibner Library. A digital version is available online.
Stephen Johnston, “Pantograph,” Instruments of Science:
An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Bud and Deborah Jean Warner, New
York & London: Garland Publishing, 1998, pp. 435-437.
Excellent articles on the pantograph and on Scheiner, with
extensive references, are online on Wikipedia.
Pantographs are still available for purchase. At the same
time, museum collections across the world include historic examples.
