Today’s #WorkerWednesday post features employees of the Joseph Bancroft & Sons Company’s Print Works Division at Eddystone, Pennsylvania. The photograph above shows a pantagraph operator at work at one of the textile manufacturer’s twenty-five machines, seen below. She is transferring a pattern for transfer onto fabric.
In this system, the operator engraves a pattern onto a zinc plate surface.The machine’s stylus is guided to follow the cut line on the zinc plate, and this motion is transferred through diminution bars and carriages to the diamond carriers that rescale the image for transfer onto varnished copper cylinders, seen at the bottom of the above photograph and mounted at the top of most of the machines, with one cylinder for each color component of the pattern.
This photograph, meanwhile, shows a sketchmaker at work designing patterns to be reduced in size and transferred by a pantagraph operator at a later date.
These circa 1930s photographs are part of the Hagley Library’s collection of Joseph Bancroft and Sons Company photographs (Accession 1969.025). To view more material from this collection online now, click here to visit its page in our Digital Archive.
