JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I’ve made a number of entries on this blog of beautiful/odd shadow practices in antique mechanical and technical drawings, though not so for a while. Today’s entry comes from a stout volume of Engineering (volume 2) 0.for 1866 and comes in an illustration for the U.S. Navy torpedo boat, the Spuyten Duyvil. The boat’s name seems like a bit difficult to maneuver, except if you’re Dutch, though it is far-better sounding than the original name, which was Stromboli.  In any event this was a torpedo boat that saw a little bit of service right at the end of the Civil War–mostly on the James River in Virginia, it seems–and was a torpedo boat. (The “torpedo” at this time was more like a mine than a powered underwater “missile” that we’d think of in these terms today.)  The chief attraction for me for these images though is a bit wholly unnecessary to understanding the boat or its workings, and that’s the shadowing for the exhaust stacks, which to me seem a little unusual, though quite lovely. And so the sharing…