ASSIGNMENT

NAME: DEFIIN SAMUEL

REFERENCE NUMBER: 9013481323

PROGRAMME: MC 155 (Technical Drawing)

th
DATE: 24 January,2024.

1. History and development of technical / engineering drawings

Answers:
The first technical drawing was made around 30 BC in ancient Egypt. Later on,
Filippo Brunelleschi, an Italian guy who loved to draw and build things, made big
changes to how we create drawings for building stuff. He didn't use maths, but he was
really good at showing how objects looked from different angles.
As ancient and earlier societies became more civilized and advanced, they planned
and organized how roads, cities, bridges, and other structures would be built;
technical drawing was the most important tool to achieve this goal, especially in the
fields of engineering and architecture which are deeply engrained in
society. After some time, technical drawings were drawn with hands by using
tools that can be regarded as primitive versions of the present day manual (traditional)
technical & engineering drawing tools: set square, ruler, protractor, and compass; it
would remain this way for about 5,000 years before the beginning of engineering
and architectural drawing/drafting. The earliest form of modern-day drawing
instruments can be found in the Museum of the Louvre, Paris, on two headless
statues of Gudea (2,130 B.C.).
Drawing is a universal language that human beings have been using to express the
visual images they conceive in their minds; it is such an old practice that its recorded
history could be as old as humanity. There is evidence that as far back as 12,000 B.C.,
ancient caves were inscribed with drawings that give clues to some human
experiences in prehistoric times. Technical & engineering drawings—or drawings that
communicate technical ideas—might have even existed before written language.
There is evidence that what we now call “technical planning” in the present-day,
actually started about 7,000 B.C.

Technical drawing has existed since ancient times. Complex technical

drawings were made in ancient times, such as the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci.
Modern engineering drawing, with its precise conventions of orthographic
projection and scale, arose in France at a time when the Industrial Revolution was in
its infancy. L. T. C. Rolt's biography of Isambard Kingdom Brunel says of his
father, Marc Isambard Brunel, that "It seems fairly certain that Marc's drawings of
his block-making machinery (in 1799) made a contribution to British engineering
technique much greater than the machines they represented. For it is safe to assume
that he had mastered the art of presenting three-dimensional objects in a two-
dimensional plane which we now call mechanical drawing. It had been evolved
by Gaspard Monge of Mezieres in 1765 but had remained a military
secret until 1794 and was therefore unknown in England."
The beginning of the Technical Drawing as a science is supported in the concept of
projections obtained over two orthogonal planar surfaces that are later put in a single
plan. This notion apparently simple, immediate and obvious, was not so evident until
Gaspar Monge (1746-1818), mathematician, physicist, engineer and a politically
involved figure in the French Revolution, established in his writings the science of
descriptive geometry, forming the basis of the current Technical Drawing. The
difficulty of representing three-dimensional space surrounding component through a
technical geometry, set on a plan, understandable, uniform, complete and rigorous
was, until then, a difficult problem to be solved. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), a
talented artist of the Renaissance era, associating its great aptitude for the arts and
the multifaceted creative capacity, sketched in many graphical documents his
inventions. Through detailed sketches obtained under various points of view and
using shadows he shows the details of shape and the functionality of the new
machines. Alfredo Bensaude (1856-1941), the first director of the Instituto Superior
Técnico (IST), of the University of Lisbon, creates the first national technical school
of engineering based in the international standards at the time, and contributes to
introduce the Technical Drawing as an essential issue and training for the future
engineers.
At inception, technical drawings were drawn with hands by using tools that can be
regarded as primitive versions of the presentday manual (traditional) technical &
engineering drawing tools: set square, ruler, protractor, and compass; it would remain
this way for about 5,000 years before the beginning of engineering
and architectural drawing/drafting. The earliest form of modern-day drawing
instruments can be found in the Museum of the Louvre, Paris, on two headless
statues of Gudea (2,130 B.C.). In ancient times, Gudea was an engineer and the
governor of the city/state of Lagash which was located in the country later
known as Babylon. Two contemporary drawing boards were also constructed and
placed on the statues of Gudea. The drawing boards had the top (plan) view of the
temple of Ningirsu, and another drawing tool that looked like a scribing instrument,
and scales.