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Les archives de l’invention

 | 
Marie-Sophie Corcy
, 
Christiane Douyère-Demeulenaere
, 
Liliane Hilaire-Pérez

Des traces aux mythes : archives et mémoire de l’invention

Transfer printing and its paper in English manufactories (1780-1830)1

Sarah Richards

Texte intégral

  • 1 The author wishes to acknowledge the generous assistance of the Spode factory in Stoke-on- (...)
  • 2 Mathias P., The transformation of England, London, Methuen, 1979, especially chap.2 and 4; (...)
  • 3 Mathias acknowledges the influence of Nathan Rosenberg’s work in his own analysis of inter (...)
  • 4 For an interesting overview, see Wyman C., « A review of early transfer-printing technique (...)

1Historians of design and the decorative arts have long held on to the model of treating their subjects as discrete entities. Numerous publications consider the histories of glass, ceramics and textiles in all their diverse aspects, but describe them in developmental trajectories that pay little attention to their interdependence in innovation and invention. This is a legacy of an academic tradition that seeks to maximise expertise through specialisation, but in the decorative arts in particular it is a legacy that has long been hostage to the demands of the saleroom to maximise the value of objects with aesthetic attributes. It is perceived as detrimental to the integrity of an artefact to draw attention to its material origins in the bowels of the earth and to its dependence on the skills and know-how of mechanics, artisans, and factory workers. With a few exceptions, notably men like Josiah Wedgwood and Matthew Boulton, the contribution of new knowledge acquired through the pursuit of scientific and technological interests in the manufacture of material culture is also glossed over. Saleroom experts are at pains to maximise the value of an artefact by drawing attention to its provenance, emphasizing the uniqueness of its history in passing through the hands of men, women and institutions of renown. It is of course not possible to account for the many anonymous individuals who were responsible for the production of our past material culture, but often it was from quotidian workshop and laboratory practice that adaptations and improvements, innovations and inventions emerged. It was also the case that new techniques, like transfer printing on pottery and porcelain, were dependent upon invention and innovation in other areas of skilled practice and manufacturing, principally that of engraving, printing, paper-making and printed textiles. In the subject under scrutiny here we need to look outside design and decorative arts histories, to the work of an economic historian like Peter Mathias, for example, in order to begin to ask some useful questions about appropriate methodologies in studying the nature of invention and innovation2. Rather than taking the customary linear approach, confined to one genus of manufacture, Mathias points out the necessity of taking a lateral approach – looking across a group of manufactures that developed an interdependency and in whose interests it was to innovate and improve upon their products3. Transfer printing, an innovation of the mid-eighteenth century, which by the nineteenth century was dependent on the paper-making industry, is particularly useful in demonstrating the merits of a lateral approach4.

  • 5 On the history of Spode’s transfer-printed products, see Drakard D. and Holdway P., Spode (...)

2Manuscript and printed documentary records are limited and erratic for the subject of transfer printing and its connection to paper-making. However, we can observe eighteenth-and nineteenth-century methods of transfer printing still in operation at the Spode factory in Stoke-on-Trent. In addition to its modern production, Spode’s cobalt blue transfer-printed range of wares, which is of interest to collectors and connoisseurs, represents, in effect, a « working archive ». In addition to written and printed records, the firm has most, if not all, of its copperplates and engraved cylinders on site. It has an engraving workshop where engravings on copper continue to be reproduced with only slight modifications from the practices of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Skilled people still operate a printing press and apply the transfer prints to the surface of fired ceramic vessels, using techniques which would be recognised by their late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century forebears5.

  • 6 On the Fourdrinier paper-making machine, see Clapperton R. H., The paper-making machine: i (...)
  • 7 Milner R., Brittains of Cheddleton, paper makers, Leek, Churnet Valley Books, 2002, p. 35.
  • 8 Wyman C., « A review… », op. cit. note 4, p. 310. There is strong evidence to suggest that (...)

3The history of the Fourdrinier paper-making machine, the descendants of which are still in use today, is well known6. Henry and Charles Fourdrinier had established themselves as paper merchants in Burslem, North Staffordshire by 1823, and in 1827 Henry Fourdrinier established the Ivy House Paper Mill, where his son George developed a high grade tissue paper for the pottery industry’s transfer-printing needs7. The printed document that establishes the significance of the Fourdrinier’s machine for the improvement of transfer printing in the pottery industry, is the report of the parliamentary select committee that investigated the patent rights of the Fourdrinier brothers in June 1837. The introduction of Hollander beaters in the middle of the seventeenth century improved the quality of papers by more effectively breaking textile rags down so that they produced sheets with an improved distribution of fibres, but uneven thickness in the tissue paper continued to cause considerable problems for underglaze transfer-printing on pottery8.

  • 9 On patents, see MacLeod C., Inventing the industrial revolution: the English patent system (...)

4Of course, patents are likely to be the first source of evidence we might turn to when investigating invention and innovation. Nevertheless, it is clear from other records, written, printed and artefactual, that not every new idea was patented. The routes by which ideas travelled and were turned into innovative methods of production were often social or commercial ones, informal rather than formal, opportunist in many cases, or the result of incremental improvement, when for example, a local millwright improved upon a gearing system fundamental to production across a variety of manufactures9.

Tacit knowledge

  • 10 On tacit knowledge, see Polanyi M., The tacit dimension, Garden City, N. Y., Doubleday, 19 (...)

5Underlying our efforts to account for the processes of invention and innovation in the past, is the problem of uncovering the role of tacit knowledge: knowledge, or know-how, that cannot be communicated easily through a written or printed text, or through a drawing, a diagram or a model, no matter how detailed in its representation10. In attempts to recover the processes by which people of the past invented and innovated or simply carried out their skilled practices, tacit knowledge must be taken as self-evident. But it can represent a frustratingly shadowy area which is out of the historian’s reach. How many of us have tried to unravel the processes of making or the workings of a machine, from historical texts and engravings and encountered the difficulties of trying to reconstruct and understand, the methods employed? When working with the engravers in the Spode factory, I had to watch their methods repeatedly and ask many questions, before feeling reasonably well satisfied that I understood in principle their highly skilled practice.

  • 11 See for example, Krogh G. von, Ichijo K. and Nonaka I., Enabling knowledge creation, Oxfor (...)
  • 12 Mathias P., op. cit. note 2, refers to ‘embodied skills’, p. 30.
  • 13 Ibid., p. 38; Rosenberg N., op. cit. note 3, p. 18. Both authors point out how the slow tr (...)
  • 14 RosenbergN., « Economic development and the transfer of technology: some historical perspe (...)

6The importance of tacit knowledge and the sharing of such knowledge is well recognised in contemporary management theory and practice as essential for the generation of innovatory ideas and the development of new skills11. In histories that investigate the making of things, because tacit or « embodied » knowledge is either difficult or impossible to recover, it is seldom acknowledged12. However, as Nathan Rosenberg and Peter Mathias argue, the acquisition of « uncodified skills » which could not be transmitted through written or verbal communication, was critical for the diffusion of invention and innovation, and the subsequent development of new manufacturing techniques and technologies13. In the case of transfer printing the development of appropriate techniques and improvements was heavily dependent on what Rosenberg identifies as the « personal mechanism»14. The understanding of the behaviour of materials, the judgment of the practised senses of sight, touch and sound, the skilled management of tools, the know-how that can speculate on « what if » and by incremental stages eliminate the unworkable, but also improve techniques through trial and error, all such knowledge is carried in people’s minds and bodily actions. These forms of knowledge are very hard to transcribe into formal structures of instruction and learning. Transfer printing is a good example of how innovations and improvements were imparted through the informal routes of social interaction, observation of daily workshop practice and subsequent adaptation of skilled procedures.

Transfer printing

  • 15 On transfer printing, see Wyman, op. cit. note 4, and Turner W., Transfer printing on enam (...)

7The development of transfer printing in England has a complicated history of diffusion with many questions still left unanswered. The technique had its origins in the Birmingham japanning and enamel trades in the late 1740s and early 1750s. The first application for a patent was made by the engraver John Brooks of Birmingham in 1751, and it was unsuccessful, which suggests other individuals were already active in the field. Relatively quickly the technique migrated to the London enamel works at Battersea and thence to the Bow, Chelsea and Worcester porcelain manufactories. In the mid-1750s two Liverpool printers, John Sadler and Guy Green, developed a similar process for printing on delftware tiles and Josiah Wedgwood was quick to see the potential of this innovation for transfer printing onto his glazed earthenware vessels. There are two distinct techniques involved here; one in which the image is transferred onto the surface of a glazed or enamelled object and another which is used only within the pottery industry, that of applying the image onto a fired, but not yet glazed ceramic surface – underglaze transfer printing. It is the latter technique that is addressed in this paper15.

  • 16 Turner W., ibid., p. 24.
  • 17 Ibid., p. 27.

8Are we talking about innovation or invention here? Printing from engraved copperplates was widely practised in close proximity to the making of artefacts in metals, glass and ceramics and prints provided numerous sources which were adapted for hand painted decoration. Not only that, many engravers were engaged in working for the calico-printing industry. Transfer printing was surely an obvious development from such practices, arrived at through informal social and working environments and through commercial routes. Printers and engravers could see the potential of such an adaptation and experimented with it. The evidence we have supports this notion, and it was French engravers working in London and in particular Simon François Ravenet, who were responsible for modifying engraving techniques to suit better the requirements of transfer printing using inorganic pigments that behaved in different ways to normal printing inks16. These men were part of a community of London artists amongst whom, William Turner speculates, « the whole round of artistic notions would be discussed. And most probably the transfer print amongst others. The invention itself – the completed idea of it – may have been the result of a consensus of thought amongst a number of artistic men assembled together… »17. The actual route to the development of transfer printing may never be known, but Turner reminds us of the importance of social networks in the communication of ideas that resulted in innovations and improvements.

  • 18 On developments in the textile industry, see for example Rose M., The Lancashire cotton in (...)

9Fig.1 shows an example from the Spode Museum of underglaze blue transfer printing on a dessert dish, and it is this type of blue and white pottery and china, so familiar to us all, which has been in continuous production at the Spode factory since at least the 1780s. There are two printing techniques employed; one in which a print is taken from a single copperplate and which is called « hot-press printing », because the copperplate must be heated to allow the colour medium to flow evenly into the intaglio. The other method used is that of « cylinder printing », in which a continuous roll of paper passes underneath an engraved cylinder which is heated from the inside. The « hot-press » method is a close relative of paper printmaking and the « cylinder » method is related to that used in calico-printing, which we will return to later18. Fig.2 shows a print on tissue paper of the same pattern seen in fig.1, the « Italian Pattern », which was taken from a single copperplate using the « hot press printing » method. This pattern has been in production at the Spode factory since the early nineteenth century.

  • 19 Milner R., op. cit. note 7, p. 40.

10In order to transfer an image successfully from a two-dimensional copperplate to a three-dimensional ceramic vessel a special kind of paper is essential. Tissue paper was used at the Battersea enamel works in the early 1750s and it is believed that a man called William Underwood brought the technique to John Turner’s pottery in Staffordshire from Derbyshire in about 1780. Paper-makers in Newcastle-under-Lyme, close to the North Staffordshire pottery towns, supplied the manufacturers with tissue paper for packing the wares, so there was a product in existence, which with modification, could be developed for transfer printing19.

Pottery tissue

11What is this paper called « pottery tissue » and what properties must it have to transfer a printed image successfully from engraved copperplate or cylinder, to the surface of a biscuit fired, or unglazed, ceramic vessel?

  • 20 As described in the Liverpool Albion, July 9, 1827, from an account of the Herculaneum man (...)

12For pottery tissue to have sufficient strength to withstand the printing process and subsequent application to a three-dimensional form, it has to be made from textile rags and not wood pulp. Early accounts describe it as « silk paper », but hemp and old naval rope provide the strongest fibres, ensuring a critical balance is maintained between absorbancy and a good printing surface20. Before a design is engraved onto a copperplate, pottery tissue is used to make a pattern that will « fit » the design to the changes in spatial direction on a three-dimensional form. The engraver then works within the outline of the pattern to ensure the design will follow the curves of shoulders, rims and necks, commonly found on ceramic vessels.

  • 21 Wyman C., « A review… », op. cit. note 4, p. 310. Wyman also refers to an earlier method, (...)

13Pottery tissue must be able to tolerate the application of a size (encollage) before it is printed. Formerly the size was made from rosin and alum, but now it is usual to use a preparation made from animal glue. The size seals the surface of the paper and ensures that the prepared colour pigment remains on the surface, rather than being absorbed into it. A similar technique for printing enamels on glass was patented by Henry Baker in 1781 using glue to coat a thin sheet of paper21. Once printed, the tissue is then applied to the unglazed surface of a vessel and has to be strong enough to undergo fairly vigorous pressure without tearing, as the transferrer rubs the paper with « soft soap » (savon noir) applied with a brush. The pressure the transferrer applies ensures that the entire print is indeed « transferred » to the vessel’s surface, but the soft soap also has the effect of acting as a separator. It enables both the print to separate from the tissue paper and the tissue paper to detach cleanly from the vessel when washed off. Here we see an innovatory process that probably came about when workers made a connection between one production technique and another. It is thought that the Spode factory introduced this improvement to transfer printing as a result of observing the use of soft soap as a separator in plaster mould making, an activity that took place in a workshop close to the transfer printers. However, the connection could have been made much earlier at the Worcester porcelain manufactory, or the idea may have come from calico printing, because the engraver Robert Hancock, who advanced the technique of transfer printing at Worcester, also worked for that branch of manufacture.

  • 22 On Louis Nicolas Robert and the Fourdrinier continuous paper-making machine, see Milner, o (...)

14Pottery tissue is a product with precise specifications. Probably introduced to the Staffordshire potteries in the 1780s, it was at that time, a handmade product. It remained so until the brothers Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier introduced the continuous paper-making machine at the Ivy House Mill, in Hanley, Staffordshire, in 1827. The idea and early prototype for a continuous paper-making machine, came from Louis Nicolas Robert in France, who was granted a temporary patent for his design in 1799. Robert’s invention was to reach England via Léger Didot, owner of the Essonnes paper mill near Paris where Robert was manager. Didot approached his English brother-in-law, John Gamble, to look for the financial support and engineering skills required to construct a similar machine in England. Gamble approached Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier, who were then partners in a London stationary firm and they found the engineer, Bryan Donkin, who agreed to develop the machine. A patent for Donkin’s first improvement of Robert’s machine was taken out in 1803 in Gamble’s name and this example begs many questions about how an invention or an innovation might be defined22.

15To cut a long and complex story short, research and development on the continuous paper-making machine had bankrupted the Fourdrinier brothers by 1810. Almost three decades later, in 1837, there was an investigation by a parliamentary committee into the merits of the Fourdrinier’s continuous paper-making machine, with the possibility of financial reparation for their losses. It is this document that highlights the significance of this breakthrough in paper manufacturing and which demonstrates the importance of interdependence in invention, innovation and improvement. The report from the select committee stated that:

  • 23 House of Commons, 1837, (35l.) xx.35, « Report from the Select Committee on Fourdrinier’s (...)

16« It is only by this great sacrifice of property on the part of the Patentees that the Public are now in possession of this extraordinary Invention, by which the community obtains Paper of a better quality at a lower price, whilst the manufacturer is enabled to supply whatever demand is made for Paper of any size, quality or description at a very short notice. This invention has enabled the earthenware manufacturers to increase the beauty and accuracy of their patterns by the aid of a superior kind of Tissue Paper; has enabled the lithographic and other engravers, paper-stainers and publishers greatly to improve their respective arts; and has led the way to many new inventions of the greatest importance, which could never have been contemplated or rendered useful had not the art of paper-making by this machine been brought to perfection by the Patentees.»23

17The select committee sat for three days in May 1837 and called about twenty witnesses to give evidence as to the merits of the Fourdrinier machine. Included were stationers, booksellers, printers (one of whom was the printer for The Times newspaper), paper-makers, paper-stainers and hangers, mapmakers and M.John Hendley Sheridan, a retired manufacturer from the Staffordshire potteries.

  • 24 Ibid, p. 29.

18The chairman of the committee asked M.Sheridan if the potteries had benefited from the introduction of Fourdrinier’s patent. Sheridan confirmed that it had « Most undoubtedly, a considerable benefit ». When asked in what way, he replied: « In the quality of the paper in the first place, and in the reduction of the price in the second, and the great facility of improving the printing, which is only commencing.»24

  • 25 Ibid.

19In this last point Sheridan was referring to the recent patents for a « new machine invented by Messrs Machin and Potts », which was a cylinder-printing machine. When asked why this invention would not be possible without that of the Fourdrinier continuous paper-making machine, Sheridan replied: « The printing of Machin and Potts is by cylinder, and consequently it requires a long paper; the paper made by hand could not answer that purpose.»25

  • 26 In The transformation of England Mathias points out that the « embodied skills » required (...)

20Returning to the quality of the paper Sheridan affirmed that the Fourdrinier machine produced a very superior product to that made by hand, with far less loss of material. Because the machine-made tissue paper was smoother than handmade, the quality of the prints was also very much finer and this was due to the calender rollers through which the tissue passed in the finishing process on the Fourdrinier machine26.

  • 27 British patents of invention (1831), n° 6162, « Obtaining Impressions from engravings in c (...)

21To return to the « new machine invented by Messrs Machin and Potts » and mentioned by M.Sheridan when giving his evidence to the select committee. The first patent for a cylinder printing machine to be applied in pottery manufactures was sought in 1831 by engravers to calico printers, John Potts, Richard Oliver, and William Wainwright Potts, from New Mills in Derbyshire27. It was a design for a machine which offered « an improved method or process of obtaining impressions from engravings in various colours, and applying the same to earthenware, porcelain, china, glass, and other similar substances ». Three more improvements to this first patent followed in 1835, 1836 and 1838, by which time William Wainwright Potts had moved to Burslem in Staffordshire and established an earthenware and china manufactory. Pott’s design was not successful in printing in several colours, but modified versions, which printed in monochrome, were adopted in the pottery industry in the late 1830s and 1840s and a few are still in use today. This is an example of a method developed in calico printing, which was adapted for transfer printing on pottery, but only because the Fourdrinier machine made it possible to print from a continuous roll of tissue paper. Like transfer printing, continuous printing was a concept that became a feasible method of production when invention and innovation in other branches of manufacture demonstrated the way forward.

  • 28 Nathan Rosenberg makes the point that « inventive activity is, itself, best described as a (...)

22By choosing to place pottery tissue paper at the centre of a study of transfer printing, I hope to have highlighted the merits of taking a lateral approach to processes of invention and innovation. It is important to reveal the complexity that lies behind what might appear to be the prosaic details of a manufacturing process and in so doing understand the significance of hidden tacit knowledge in the making of things. Tacit knowledge accounts for so much of what was, and still is, incremental improvement and innovation in manufacturing28. Pottery tissue, like the other fine papers produced at the Ivy House Mill, was not a straightforward product to manufacture, but it was indispensible to the pottery industry throughout the nineteenth century. In addition it has been my intention to demonstrate the potential, where possible, of taking a broader definition of what we might think of as an « archive ». A modern factory, but one where techniques of the past are reproduced in the present, can hold knowledge in its written and printed records of course, but also in its artefacts, and most importantly in the know-how of the people who work there. I am arguing here for histories of design and the decorative arts which are informed by artefacts and practices as much as by written and printed sources; histories which bring the complex interaction of human agents back to the centre in the making of material culture.

Fig.1 : dessert plate, Italian pattern, early nineteenth century.

By kind permission of the Trustees of the Spode Museum.

Fig.2 : ‘hot press’ print on pottery tissue, Italian pattern, 2003.

By kind permission of Spode Museum.

Notes

1 The author wishes to acknowledge the generous assistance of the Spode factory in Stoke-on-Trent, North Staffordshire, especially Paul Holdway; also Roger Brindley of Tullis Russell Coaters Ltd in Hanley, North Staffordshire.

2 Mathias P., The transformation of England, London, Methuen, 1979, especially chap.2 and 4; see also Mathias P. and Davis J. A. ed., Innovation and technology in Europe: from the eighteenth century to the present day, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1991; Musson A. E. and Robinson E. provide a wide survey of the connections between science, technology and entrepreneurial activity in the eighteenth century in Science and technology in the industrial revolution, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1969.

3 Mathias acknowledges the influence of Nathan Rosenberg’s work in his own analysis of interdependence and technological diffusion, see for example Rosenberg N., « Factors affecting the diffusion of technology », Explorations in economic history, vol. 10, 1972- 1973, p. 3- 33.

4 For an interesting overview, see Wyman C., « A review of early transfer-printing techniques », English ceramic circle transactions, vol. 16/3, p. 307-317, 1998, and « The early techniques of transfer printing », English ceramic circle transactions, vol. 10/4/5, 1980.

5 On the history of Spode’s transfer-printed products, see Drakard D. and Holdway P., Spode printed ware, London and New York, Longman, 1983. This book, and the articles by Wyman published in the English ceramic circle transactions, demonstrate the value of reworking and recreating skilled processes that are no longer practised today in order to understand better their early history, for example, the recovery of « bat printing » techniques. See note 7 below.

6 On the Fourdrinier paper-making machine, see Clapperton R. H., The paper-making machine: its invention, evolution and development, Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1967.

7 Milner R., Brittains of Cheddleton, paper makers, Leek, Churnet Valley Books, 2002, p. 35.

8 Wyman C., « A review… », op. cit. note 4, p. 310. There is strong evidence to suggest that because of problems with paper transfer-printing techniques, early on-glaze transfer printing on pottery was carried out using the so-called glue bat-printing process, in which the print was transferred from a copperplate by a smooth slab of gelatine. A clear or coloured oil was the medium used, and the enamel colour was dusted onto the print where it adhered to the oil medium on the surface of the vessel or tile. It was a ‘print and pounce’ technique. However, this method was not suitable for transfer printing on an unglazed ceramic surface, for which pottery tissue paper was the best medium available.

9 On patents, see MacLeod C., Inventing the industrial revolution: the English patent system, 1660- 1800, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

10 On tacit knowledge, see Polanyi M., The tacit dimension, Garden City, N. Y., Doubleday, 1966.

11 See for example, Krogh G. von, Ichijo K. and Nonaka I., Enabling knowledge creation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002.

12 Mathias P., op. cit. note 2, refers to ‘embodied skills’, p. 30.

13 Ibid., p. 38; Rosenberg N., op. cit. note 3, p. 18. Both authors point out how the slow transmission of such skills, or the failure to implant them, can account in some part for the inertia, and apparently illogical trajectories to nowhere in certain industries during the industrial revolutions in Europe and the USA.

14 RosenbergN., « Economic development and the transfer of technology: some historical perspectives », Technology and culture, vol. 11/4, 1970, p. 550-575.

15 On transfer printing, see Wyman, op. cit. note 4, and Turner W., Transfer printing on enamels, porcelain and pottery, London, Chapman and Hall, 1907.

16 Turner W., ibid., p. 24.

17 Ibid., p. 27.

18 On developments in the textile industry, see for example Rose M., The Lancashire cotton industry: a history since 1700 , Preston, Lancashire County Books, 1996.

19 Milner R., op. cit. note 7, p. 40.

20 As described in the Liverpool Albion, July 9, 1827, from an account of the Herculaneum manufactory, and cited in Wyman C., « The early… », op. cit. note 4, p. 187.

21 Wyman C., « A review… », op. cit. note 4, p. 310. Wyman also refers to an earlier method, probably used at the Chelsea porcelain manufactory in the late 1750s, for underglaze blue printing, p. 311-312. In an appendix on p. 315-316, Wyman has included Jean Hellot’s account in French, of the transfer-printing process observed by Jacques Brolliet during a short period working at Chelsea in 1758 to 1759.

22 On Louis Nicolas Robert and the Fourdrinier continuous paper-making machine, see Milner, op. cit. note 7, and Clapperton R. H., op. cit. note 6. Today, the paper coating firm of Tullis Russell Coaters stands on the site of the Fourdrinier brothers’ Ivy House Mill. Tullis Russell Coaters took over the firm of Brittains Ltd., which formerly had specialised in the production of pottery printing tissue and glass transfer tissue, as well as India paper for bibles, airmail paper, cigarette paper, carbon papers and tissues for the electrical industry. Although pottery tissue is no longer produced in Staffordshire, Tullis Russell Coaters is one of the world leaders in the production of special coated papers for transfer printing in several different applications.

23 House of Commons, 1837, (35l.) xx.35, « Report from the Select Committee on Fourdrinier’s patent », London, HMSO, 1837, p. iv.

24 Ibid, p. 29.

25 Ibid.

26 In The transformation of England Mathias points out that the « embodied skills » required to produce precision machinery for processes like calendering and roller printing was in short supply, and diffusion of these new machines was often dependent on the movement of a few artisans from place to place at home and abroad, who had acquired the new skills to produce them, op. cit. note 2, p. 36.

27 British patents of invention (1831), n° 6162, « Obtaining Impressions from engravings in colours for earthenware », Potts, Oliver & Potts Specification.

28 Nathan Rosenberg makes the point that « inventive activity is, itself, best described as a gradual process of accretion, a cumulation of minor improvements, modifications and economies… », op. cit. note 3, p. 7.

Table des illustrations

Légende Fig.1 : dessert plate, Italian pattern, early nineteenth century.
Crédits By kind permission of the Trustees of the Spode Museum.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pumi/docannexe/image/40913/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 54k
Légende Fig.2 : ‘hot press’ print on pottery tissue, Italian pattern, 2003.
Crédits By kind permission of Spode Museum.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pumi/docannexe/image/40913/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 97k

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Formerly Manchester Metropolitan University.

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