Have you ever wondered about Louis Poyet, the hand behind some of the period drawings we publish?The Tissandier Electric Dirigible and the Ayrton Perry Electric Tricycle were two recent ones, but we have used his work in other posts as well. Louis was a ‘scientific popularizer’ who used his engraving skills to share scientific progress, just as we do here.
Louis Poyet Uses Engravings to Illustrate Progress
Engraving is marking a design onto a surface with a sharp object. This was the standard for creating metal plates for printing illustrations throughout the 19th Century. In those days, craftspeople painstakingly created the plates by hand. Nowadays, willing machines do the work for us.
Louis Poyet was a pioneer in his own right, although the devices he illustrated largely overshadowed his own fame. He came from a family of pastry makers in the southeastern region of France. Then, in 1887 he moved to Paris at age 31 to work as an engraver for scientific author Gaston Tissandier. That’s right, the same Tissandier who built the Electric Dirigible.
Snapshots of an Exciting New Electrical World
There must have been powerful chemistry between the two men. For they worked together right up to the time of Louis Poyet’s death, and at one stage his studio employed 40 artisans. However, the master engraver was still a free agent who collaborated with other authors too.
He made a significant contribution to engineer Arthur Good’s series ‘The Fun Science, 100 Experiments’. This was a sell-out success in 59 editions popularizing science in Spain, England, Scandinavia, Russia, and the United States. Contemporary society would have been poorer in scientific knowledge were it not for his painstakingly accurate work.
So we would have been too, and unable to reproduce his work in this series. Remember, there were no cameras in the exciting times Louis Poyet lived through. He went to his rest in 1913, but his engravings of progress continue to shed light on where we came from.
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