JF Ptak Science Books,  Quick Post

Benjamin Butterworth, the Commission of Patents, produced in 1892 a superb work on the history of state of technical achievement in the U.S., The Growth of Industrial Art. The “art” part of the title actually referred to the creation-as-art of industry/technology more so than the design aspect of it, though the two are pretty closely related.  There were 200 plates of illustrations for inventions for windmills, mails, screws, cork, bicycles, harvesters, threshers, glass makers,, ice harvesters, cigar manufacturing, sweeping, telephones, telegraphy, and so on, in more than 150 categories.   Among these images some of my favorites are for advertising apparatus and means.  For example, in the historical timeline below we find in #7 an automated flying leaflet distributor, and according to the text it was (unlikely) patented in 1862:

#6 is cringeworthy, showing the very common practice of covering optimally-placed buildings with billboards–I’ve seen numerous early-ish images (19th c) showing large swaths of buildings on busy streets nearly entirely covered by ads.  

From Internet Archive, the full text with illustrations can be found here:  https://archive.org/stream/growthindustria00Unit#page/n9/mode/2up

Text from the illustrations: