The Engineer’s Art

I am both a historian of art and a collector of scientific and technological devices. I have had a dual fascination with art and machines for as long as I can remember. My collecting probably began when I was nine or ten, when a neighbor asked me to give her a hand cleaning her basement. Offered a dollar or two for my efforts, I diffidently asked if I might instead have a broken clock I had seen in the laundry room.

It was a battered Ansonia, one of those cheap Victorian clocks that gave full employment to generations of workers in Connecticut’s Brass Valley. That was the first machine I worked to acquire, but my fascination with technological objects had come even earlier. My kindergarten report card, from more than fifty years ago, states: “Tom’s chief interest is electricity. The lights on the Christmas tree interested him much more than the decorations or the Christmas activities.”

Was this to be the beginning of an engineering career? Hardly. I trained as an art historian, and my work as a museum curator, director, and writer has involved me mainly with contemporary American art and artists. But I have had several formative experiences at what might be called intersections of art and engineering. As a college student in the early 1950s, I walked miles through Victorian Philadelphia—much of it since demolished—listening to every word spoken by my guide, a fellow student named Walter Kidney. Now an architectural historian, he seemed to know about every building we passed, no matter how modest. From him I learned a love of nineteenth-century design and building technology. A few years later I worked as an assistant to O. Winston Link, a New York photographer who was driven to create a remarkable record of the Norfolk and Western Railway, the last steam-powered line in the United States, and the towns along its way. He photographed most often at night, using lighting devices of his own invention to create scenes that were at once both visual archeology and nocturnes that are reminiscent of Orson Welles’s movies. From Link I learned to respect obsessive behavior and to enjoy the experience of tons of flailing steel as the locomotives thundered past us in the dark.

In the early sixties I discovered, exhibited, and wrote about the photographs of Charles Currier, a late-nineteenth-century Bostonian who turned his camera as thoughtfully on the mills of New England as on the homes of their owners. Later, influenced by both Link and Currier, I photographed the steam-pumping machinery built at the end of the last century to provide Boston with fresh water and carry its effluent out to the sea.

My fascination with machines and instruments of measurement and control has continued to grow over the years. The small devices I collect are surrogates on a domestic scale for the locomotives and steam pumps I cannot own. I especially admire their refinement, their conception as objects of veneration and high craftsmanship. I am interested in what they say historically about technology and design at the time of their manufacture, and I enjoy their Newtonian articulations and what some of them tell me about my own environment.

I am especially fascinated by what I call the “art signs” that these machines convey. I borrow the term from my doctor; he uses it as a way of describing how he employs his senses to make his first diagnostic assessments of a patient’s condition, before the lab work arrives. I draw my own art signs from the objects I have collected. Not only are these signs based on an understanding of the instruments’ functions, but they begin with the appeal of the machines to the senses. As an outsider in the world of science and technology, I find mysteries in these devices—and I like that. I am not so interested in solving these mysteries as in playing upon them in a way that is personally edifying even if it is not scientifically correct or meaningful. Of course, their original functions are important too, and I have brought a number of them back to working order, for their appearance is only one aspect of their appeal; the recording instruments especially are fully alive only when they are working.

I collect recording and measuring instruments and devices built from about 1875 to the middle of this century. Such objects are much at risk—old, inconvenient to use and interpret, obsolete but not yet considered antique or widely collectible. They are often thrown out or sold in bulk to surplus dealers. In my collection are barometers and barographs, hygrothermographs, pyranographs, and meters for indicating and recording electrical changes, from galvanometers to heavy ammeters, potentiometers, and Wheatstone bridges. I also own analytical balances, microscopes, and other optical instruments. None of what I have collected remains in current production, though many similar devices surely still remain in service.

I find “art” in these machines not only in their craftsmanship but also in their broader quality of judgment and rightness, balance, and completeness. This is art insofar as it is about obsession, about building an instrument in the best possible manner, with integrity and respect for its use. It is art at a very far remove from that of the museums and galleries with which I am familiar, and I take pleasure in its discovery in unexpected places.

The art demonstrated by these objects is a kind of polar opposite to the art of folk art—another, more widely collected art form also created outside the world of high style. Folk art is usually valued for its unique, personal, instinctual qualities, the “feeling” imbued in it by its untutored and usually anonymous makers. Scientific instruments avoid instinct to serve their designated tasks repeatedly and without error. Their articulations may be clever, but they do not express information that is either unique or personal. Indeed, these instruments appeal to me because they make manifest, I believe, the immutable verities of grand physical laws.

They also intrigue me for a reason that may have more to do with more traditional notions of art. Drawing, the act of making a mark, is the fundamental gesture of art. Many of these devices draw, and they draw for days or even months at a time. As they draw, they translate information from one medium into another, making concrete the record of evanescent events. In the traditional work of art a similar conversion renders the invisible—the artist’s inner vision—into a physical, accessible form.

My recording instruments—barographs, hygrothermographs, pyranographs, and the like—mysteriously convert something not immediately visible or perceptible into a mark, a sinuous line on a band or disk of paper. Such a marking is a document of patience and constancy and is created so slowly as to seem imperceptible. No human hand could operate at this pace. One observes the mark; the activity of creating it is not easily witnessed. The devices in my collection use old-fashioned ways to record their information. They employ delicate linkages, levers, beams, counterweights, and springs to create their particular motions, transliterating time and energy into line and space. These little triumphs of Newtonian mechanics are the only kind of instrument with which I feel fully comfortable, because they are the only kind in which I can see and trace the action of the system from one end to the other.

On my desk there’s a barograph whose Art Deco design dates from the late thirties, its chrome-and-glass case softened with speed lines. The object is a comment on the history of design as well as a functional instrument. The container for the aneroid bellows and the other supporting members within its case are formed of stepped cylinders, tiny analogues of the skyscrapers of the period, Chrysler Buildings under glass. The linkage that carries the movement from the bellows travels under the floor of the device and appears as a vertical rod attached to a walking beam, which in turn connects to two dashpots, smaller stepped cylinders each containing a plunger immersed in mineral oil. These dampen any minor jolts but offer no resistance to the slower but irresistible force of air pressure. The walking beam is supported by a rod delicately pivoted between two more Art Deco columns. The rod also carries the arm and pen that make the drawn record. The chart produced is itself short. Seven days, 168 hours of time, is converted into just ten inches of space. Each 2-hour period is reduced to an eighth of an inch of graphic information. I cannot feel the change the pen describes as it ascends, peaks, and descends, but I know I am witnessing a powerful physical change. It may be that I’m so moved because I understand so little about meteorology. What I don’t know is magic to me, but it is also very much related to what I don’t know in drawings from the hand of a master draftsman: No matter how well 1 may understand the artist’s work, I shall always be at some remove from the mysteries of the creative process.

Microscopes and surveyor’s instruments, devices that expand or compress space, extend this mystery. I don’t use my transit or wye level for its accustomed purpose but rather for the creation of a little personal work of conceptual art. I look through the transit and imagine my line of sight as somehow solid (if without substance), connecting me with the elements of my surroundings in an invisible, sculptural web. I do not look idly around; when the instrument is properly leveled and aligned, my sightings are a way of establishing my position in space, anchoring my precise location on certain coordinates and relationships of objects and distances.

In 1970, while working in Southern California, I came to know the artist Chris Burden and his work as a performance sculptor. In one of his most notorious works he had himself nicked in the upper arm with a bullet fired by a fellow artist. This piece was widely interpreted as a nihilist comment on either art or the Vietnam War. When I questioned Chris about it, his answer was disarmingly simple. He wanted, he said, to create an evanescent, high-speed sculpture, one that would be over in an instant but leave a permanent trace of its passing. His idea and its image (if not his means of achieving it) have fascinated me ever since. Now, using the transit from the window of my office on the second floor of my home, I find that I am directly level with the finial on the tower of a stylish turn-of-the-century cow barn on the agricultural campus of the University of Wisconsin. I see across several blocks to this tower, and by a leap of mind I can imagine myself on an invisible airborne bridge that connects me with that building.

The objects in my collection, no matter what their intended use or the use to which I put them, also are enjoyable for the sheer pleasure of their appearance and touch. This is especially true of those about whose original functions I have little knowledge. They hold their magic yet, and here I must use the art signs, aesthetic measurements, upon them. Many of these instruments possess basic qualities of works of art: They have been constructed to represent the pinnacle of achievement, and no expense or effort appears to have been spared in their manufacture. They were in their day precious machines reserved for arcane acts of the most precise measurement, and they were built to look the part.

One such instrument in my collection is a potentiometer and Wheatstone bridge with the maker’s name and city—“Otto Wolff, Berlin”—engraved into its hard rubber top. A circuit diagram inside its mahogany cover bears the date June 1911, although the device’s design would appear to be from the late nineteenth century. (Without market pressures or technological need for change, such equipment often remained unaltered for decades.) I understand the instrument’s use only imperfectly. What I understand well is that it was a device essential to the advancement of science and the verification of technology. The laboratory for which it was made probably paid dearly to acquire it, and it was built with the care and endowed with the appearance that its cost demanded. The massive handles that adjust its resistance coils operate sliders that glide over crisply cut and faceted brass steps held in place with specially turned cylindrical screws.

It is this appearance—and touch—that appeals to me most strongly. There is no ornamentation; the apparatus’s decoration derives from the functional correctness of its design. The instrument builders of the time well understood that the quality of such a device would be perceived not only by how it functioned but also by the standard of Tightness and balance that the design conveyed. They, too, believed in art signs. And so such an object offers not only pleasure to the senses but also lessons in history and theater. Its formidable appearance suggests that a person of powerful character and certain knowledge was required to operate it properly. This was an implement for an intimidating Prussian professor. In its vigorous and robust presence it is quintessential male. It is as architectural and Teutonic as the Reichstag, a mirror of the culture that created it.

At the time this machine was built, electricity seemed too precious and too new to hide. It remained enough of a mystery to require propitiating attention and care in the design and manufacture of equipment for its generation, control, and measurement. The articulation of this equipment was simple, making the control of electricity highly visible. Pride was taken in the manly endeavor needed to tame this new force. Look at the stance and the expressions on the faces of the men in Charles Currier’s photograph of an electrical generating plant in a Boston brewery (page 21). This installation was modest as these things went, with a slab of slate instead of marble for the switchboard, but the steam engine and generator rest on a chamfered plinth of granite, and the switchboard, the altar of the new power, is electrically lighted, a spot of incandescence in an otherwise dimly lit interior. It was in this spirit that Otto Wolff made his potentiometer, with excitement and pride in the knowledge of the new world to come. “Throwing a switch” was not just a turn of phrase in the operation of these machines. It took decisiveness and perhaps a bit of courage too.

My instrument collection, if it can be called that, began with several meters for measuring electrical information. Invariably they came housed in beautifully constructed cases of mahogany, walnut, or oak. Fitted with leather handles and brass binding posts, they seemed to marry elements of furniture and technology, as though the new science was somehow more comfortable with a warm reference to the past. The major exceptions seem to be meters made for switchboard use. The respect instrument designers of the early twentieth century felt for their products—and for the phenomena they measured—is nowhere better seen than in the meters created for electric generating or distribution stations. Many of them were recording watt-hour meters or ammeters with porcelain or silvered dials and gear trains constructed like fine clocks. They most often were clad in transparent cylinders or cubes of glass, exposing their entire mechanism to view, much of it handsomely trimmed in nickel or copper. This attention to appearance is particularly remarkable considering that these objects were never meant to be seen or appreciated by the public. The manufacturers knew it was important to the quality of an instrument that its art signs be perceived. Their careful detailing bespoke equally close and serious attention to function and appearance.

The design and manufacture of scientific instruments has undergone a radical transformation in the last thirty years, achieving what might be described as the democratization of accuracy. Levers, pinions, wheels, and linkages have given way to microprocessors that read data at exquisite levels of sensitivity and reveal it instantly on digital displays. This transformation has affected our lives far beyond the laboratory, but to my eye the gains have been accompanied by losses.

What has disappeared is a hierarchy of splendidly produced contrivances that sought a grail of precision and accuracy through ever-greater mechanical and design refinements. This loss is seen most obviously and pervasively in timekeepers. The historian David Landes is blunt about it in his book Revolution in Time . “Science had defeated art,” he writes. When accuracy was achievable only in the finest mechanical clocks and instruments, it was these devices that received the greatest attention in their construction and finish. Functional precision no longer requires the finish that produced those sensate instruments. Such finishes today would simply add to the cost. Today one may buy for a few dollars a quartz watch that exceeds the accuracy of the finest and most expensive mechanical timepiece. But it doesn’t feel the same.

The quantum/microprocessor revolution has obviated many of the most clever mechanical means of achieving the transfer of information from one medium to another, at a great cost in beauty and aesthetic energy. Analytical balances, for example, used to be triumphs of bridge engineering in miniature, delicate, highly polished cantilevered constructions, protected from dust and drafts in glass-sided wooden enclosures whose counterbalanced doors rose at the slightest touch. Today’s solid-state balances more closely resemble blenders or coffee makers. They are boxes with a few “soft touch” buttons and an LED readout. They do their job to perfection, but colorlessly and without excitement. What we have gained is incalculable. What we have lost is dimensionality: structure, texture, and touch.

I do not bemoan the loss of the past or collect these instruments as an anodyne to a present I don’t appreciate, but they do serve as an important reference point for me. Much of my work in contemporary art is far from down-to-earth. I often deal with what might be called aesthetic quantum mechanics—ideas that are still floating free before becoming more fixed and palpable. My instruments serve as a grounding, offering me a calibration point in history, design, technology. They are an art form of another sort and from another time and place, fixed and constant.