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A single art about which one would want to represent everything and say everything would furnish volumes of discourse [written texts] & plates. One would never finish if one proposed to render in figures all the states through which a piece of iron passes before being transformed into a needle. That the discourse follow the process of the artist to the last detail, fine. As for the figures, we have restricted them to the important movements of the worker & only the moments of the operation that are very easy to depict and very difficult to explain. We have limited ourselves to the essential circumstances, to those of which the representation, when it is well done, leads necessarily to the knowledge of those that one does not see.1
Thus did Denis Diderot (1713-84), editor of the famous Encyclpedie, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers, acknowledge at the outset some of the difficulties in representing the mechanical arts in words and pictures. Nor did the difficulties diminish as the project progressed. Yet the diverse implications of technical representation have been overshadowed by a historiography that focuses on liberal philosophy and politics. This article is an attempt to redress this imbalance, at least in part, by uncovering the multiple meanings in the Encyclopedie's three forms of portraying the arts: namely, in articles organized alphabetically in the seventeen volumes of text; in eleven volumes of pictures (engraved or etched plates); and in the "explanations" accompanying the plates.
Diderot regarded the representations of the arts as a social responsibility. As the Encyclopadie spread across Europe and to the New World, it served as a vehicle for transmitting technological ideas.2 Thomas Jefferson bought a Lucca edition for the United States in Paris in 1781, and a generation later Thomas Blanchard, inventor of automatic machines for making gunstocks, referred to the cams illustrated in the Encyclopedie in one of his patents.3
The 1951 bicentennial of the Enclopedie's publication stimulated new interest in the work.4 There were detractors; some historians discredited the Encyclopedie's representations of the arts as obsolete even at the time of initial publication or disparaged them as unoriginal. Still, historians continued to use the Encyclopedie, especially the plates, as a primary source to illustrate early...