Hachette's chart (fig. 28) had set the pattern for display of mechanical contrivances in practical journals and in the large number of mechanical dictionaries that were compiled to meet an apparent demand for such information. It is a little surprising, however, to find how persistent were some of Hachette's ideas that could only have come from the uppermost superficial layer of his cranium. See, for example, his "anchored ferryboat" (fig. 34). This device, employed by Hachette to show conversion of continuous rectilinear motion into alternating circular motion, appeared in one publication after another throughout the 19th century. As late as 1903 the ferryboat was still anchored in Hiscox's Mechanical Movements, although the tide had changed (fig. 35).[90]
[ [90] Gardner D. Hiscox, ed., Mechanical Movements, ed. 10, New York, 1903, p. 151. The ferryboat did not appear in the 1917 edition.
Figure 34.—Hachette's ferryboat of 1808, a "machine" for converting continuous rectilinear motion into alternating circular motion. From Phillipe Louis Lanz and Augustin de Bétancourt, Essai sur la composition des machines (Paris, 1808, pl. 2).
Figure 35.—Ferryboat from Gardner D. Hiscox, ed., Mechanical Movements (ed. 10, New York, 1903, p. 151).
During the upsurge of the Lyceum—or working-man's institute—movement in the 1820's, Jacob Bigelow, Rumford professor of applied science at Harvard University, gave his popular lectures on the "Elements of Technology" before capacity audiences in Boston. In preparing his lecture on the elements of machinery, Bigelow used as his authorities Hachette, Lanz and Bétancourt, and Olinthus Gregory's mechanical dictionary, an English work in which Hachette's classification scheme was copied and his chart reproduced.[91]
[ [91] Jacob Bigelow, Elements of Technology, ed. 2, Boston, 1831, pp. 231-256; Olinthus Gregory, A Treatise of Mechanics, 3 vols., ed. 3, London, 1815.
A translation of the work of Lanz and Bétancourt[92] under the title Analytical Essay on the Construction of Machines, was published about 1820 at London by Rudolph Ackermann (for whom the Ackermann steering linkage was named), and their synoptic chart was reprinted again in 1822 in Durham.[93] In the United States, Appleton's Dictionary of Machines[94] (1851) adopted the same system and used the same figures. Apparently the wood engraver traced directly onto his block the figures from one of the reprints of Lanz and Bétancourt's chart because the figures are in every case exact mirror images of the originals.
[ [92] Rudolph Ackermann, Analytical Essay on the Construction of Machines, London, about 1820, a translation of Lanz and Bétancourt, op. cit. (footnote 64).