Design Plans, Working Drawings, National Styles: Engineering Practice in Great Britain and the United States, 1775-1945

During the summer of 1940, across the oceans of the world, British merchant freighters were sinking, victims of Nazi Germany's U-boat campaign. With its very survival in immediate doubt, the British government sent a purchasing commission across the hostile Atlantic to order replacement freighters from North American shipyards. To save desperately needed time the commissioners brought complete plans, drafted in Britain, for a general cargo carrier of 10,000 tons. American yards had ample experience in building such tramp steamers, and after two decades of depressed sales they had a keen interest in the business. The commissioners quickly closed a deal for sixty freighters, but then all progress came to a stop. Much to the commissioners' surprise and dismay, their ship and engine plans proved essentially meaningless to managers and workers at the American yards. The entire set had to be redrafted, and hundreds of additional drawings were needed before work could begin on building the freighters that would help save the war for Britain. ¹ During the war George Bernard Shaw famously quipped, "England and America are two countries separated by the same language." But such translational difficulties were not supposed to arise in engineering drawings. Indeed, mechanical engineers pointedly asserted that drawings were "a universal language" whose representational quality made plans comprehensible to all. ² The British commissioners learned, however, that even the visual language of engineering derived its meanings from culture--from the values, institutions, and social relations of its creators and users.

This article examines the development and uses of mechanical drawings to uncover the cultural beliefs and political ends of engineers who wielded this outwardly rational instrument of their professional practice. The prescriptive power and hierarchical purposes of dimensioned plans have been emphasized by Steven Lubar and Bruno Latour. ³ Here I build on those fundamental insights by providing a narrative account that discusses how and why the forms and uses of mechanical drawings in Britain and the United States diverged so fundamentally by 1940, as the British commission discovered. In the 150 years preceding their visit to America, dimensioned plans had become an essential tool in the professional practice of mechanical engineers the world over. But because British and American engineers operated in different social contexts, their applications of plans (and the drawings themselves) came to reflect and reinforce their host cultures. My analytical goal is to use the differences in Anglo-American drafting practices to delineate the unique professional cultures of mechanical engineers in the two nations. Comparisons of British and American mechanical engineering have long concerned economic historians. ⁴ More recently, technological historians interested in the vital shaping effects of cultures have written insightful portraits of national styles of engineering practice. ⁵ Both those literatures serve as useful points of departure here.

Through the lens afforded by specific drawings and by drafting practices generally, this article analyzes a broad, culturally derived divergence in the professional practice of British and American mechanical engineers over the span of more than a century. To sharpen that analysis across space and time, however, I focus on the uses of plans in key British and American capital equipment industries: machine tools, locomotives, metal ships, and marine power plants. ⁶ Focusing on drafting practice in industries common to both nations sharpens this portrait of national styles of engineering practice. This cross-national comparison also helps to distinguish among the technical, economic, social, and cultural influences that affected engineers in their work. ⁷

By mechanical drawings I mean formal and detailed plans, drawn to scale and often with dimensions noted (plate 1, following page 216). Such drawings generally included at least two of the characteristic triad of plan, elevation, and section views. To the uninitiated, all mechanical drawings seem indecipherably alike, showing whole machines, subassemblies, or individual parts in highly rationalized...