The pantograph is a drawing instrument used to enlarge and reduce figures. It was devised by the Jesuit astronomer and mathematician Christoph Scheiner in 1603 and described by him in a 1631 publication. Scheiner’s instrument was of wood. Pantographs were soon made elsewhere in Europe of brass. French makers also introduced ebony forms of the instrument.
As the collections at Harvard University demonstrate, pantographs were sold in the United States by the late eighteenth century. The examples in the NMAH collections date from the nineteenth and twentieth century. They were imported from Great Britain, France, Germany, and Switzerland—with a few patented and sold in the U.S.
The principle of the pantograph was adopted in machines used by printers to enlarge and reduce the size of etchings. It also found applications in textile design and in an early device used to punch cards for statistical tabulation. Devices in roughly the shape of a pantograph have been used on trains since the nineteenth century. This object group does not attempt to describe these applications, although searching the NMAH collections database for the term “pantograph” brings up some relevant objects.
References:
Christoph Scheiner, Pantographice seu ars delineandi (Rome, 1631). There is a copy of this volume in the Smithsonian’s Dibner Library. A digital version is available online.
Stephen Johnston, “Pantograph,” Instruments of Science: An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Bud and Deborah Jean Warner, New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1998, pp. 435-437.
Excellent articles on the pantograph and on Scheiner, with extensive references, are online on Wikipedia.
Pantographs are still available for purchase. At the same time, museum collections across the world include historic examples.