Figure 16.—1783: Cabinetmaker's dividers of English manufacture, dated, and marked T. Pearmain. See detail, figure 17. (Smithsonian photo 49792-C.)
Figure 17.—1783: Detail of cabinetmaker's dividers showing name and date.
Figure 18.—18th century: Carpenter's dividers of English origin, undated. (Smithsonian photo 49792-B.)
On first sight, it is the conformation rather than any facet of its technical or social significance that strikes the eye; perhaps the most decorative of tools are early dividers and calipers which, prior to their standardization, existed in seemingly endless variety. The great dividers used by the shipbuilder and architect for scribing and measuring timbers not only indicate building techniques (accession 61.548) but also document 17th-and early 18th-century decorative metalwork, as seen in figure 13. Well before the 17th century, artists and engravers recognized them as intriguing shapes to include in any potpourri of instruments, either in cartouches or the frontispieces of books (fig. 14).
Figure 19.—1855: The frontispiece from Edward Shaw, The Modern Architect (Boston, 1855), shows the carpenter's dividers in the foreground unchanged in form from those illustrated in figure 18. Of further interest in Shaw's plate is the dress of the workmen and the balloon frame of the house under construction. (Smithsonian photo 49792-A.)
The two pairs of cabinetmaker's dividers illustrated in figures 15 and 16 suggest significant changes in the design of a basic tool. The dividers shown in figure 15 are English and would seem to be of early 18th-century origin, perhaps even earlier. They are Renaissance in feeling with decorated legs and a heart-shaped stop on the end of the slide-arm. In character, they are like the great dividers shown in figure 13: functional, but at the same time preserving in their decoration the features common to a wide variety of ironwork and wares beyond the realm of tools alone. The dividers pictured in figure 16 are a decided contrast. Dated 1783, they are strongly suggestive of Sheffield origin. Gone is the superfluous decoration; in its place is the strong, crisp line of a tool that has reached nearly the ultimate of function and manufacture, a device which both in general appearance and precise design is very modern in execution. Equally intriguing are the smaller, more slender dividers (accession 319557) of the 18th-century house-builder as seen in figure 18, a form that changed very little, if at all, until after 1850—a fact confirmed by the frontispiece of Edward Shaw's The Modern Architect, published in Boston in 1855 (fig. 19). The double calipers of the woodturner (fig. 20) have by far the most appealing and ingenious design of all such devices. Designed for convenience, few tools illustrate better the aesthetic of the purely functional than this pair of 19th-century American calipers.