STERILIZED DRAWING

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 This month in 1858, Hymen L. Lipman was awarded the very first patent for a pencil.

The Patent Office requires a schematic drawing with each application.  The drawing must be plain, clear, and straightforward: a simple black line on a white background.  Any use of imagination is strictly forbidden.  No exaggerations, no color, no expressive variety in the line allowed.  

How much important information can be conveyed in such a sterile format?

Here is the drawing Walt Disney used to obtain a patent for his animation camera, 82 years after the patent for the pencil: 

 


Like the diagram of the pencil, Disney’s schematic doesn’t begin to convey the wonders that would one day flow from these inventions.   


Patent drawings may look sterile, but drawing is a centicipitous art form, and drawings which celebrate clarity and precision above all other virtues have a strength of their own. In his book, The Art of the Patent, Kevin Prince shows how patent drawings have developed a language for conveying information with a plain black line.  Federal regulations have established these conventions for showing specific characteristics:

Looking at patent drawings, I enjoy those occasions when we catch a small glimpse of a human pulse.
Here, for example, some Walter Mitty draftsman just couldn’t help adding a cool rock n’ roller behind this guitar invention.
Scary!
And I’m sure the Patent Office didn’t really require a drawing of a bathing beauty to understand how to hold a brush:

A patent artist’s equivalent of Gil Elvgren

Even the most sterilized art forms can’t quite conceal the mad passion in our blood.

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