Hidden among the vast holdings of the New York Public Library is a set of 52 images of playing cards donated by William Barclay Parsons, arguably most famous for being the chief engineer of the Interborough Rapid Transit system, New York’s oldest subway. Each card has an illustration vaguely related to its designation. For example, the eight of clubs, above, has a sheave system with four pulleys and four working lines of rope. There’s no obvious “nine” in the worm gears with the nine of clubs below, but maybe I’m missing it. The diamonds seem to be pure geometry, the clubs simple machines (the king of clubs has a rather amusing nut-cracker), the hearts are (maybe) generative geometry, and the spades comparative geometry.
The description reads “Each of these engraved cards is illustrated with geometrical figures, diagrams, graphs, or engineering instruments (backs are plain)….Parsons…collected widely on engineering.” I collect widely in terms of engineering books – mostly digital copies of books long out of copyright – and I’ve never seen anything like these cards.
The illustrations are either old or someone, possibly Parsons, drew them to look as if they were far older than the nineteenth century. Given that Parsons researched and wrote a book about engineering in the Renaissance it would not be at all surprising if he found the designs and had the cards printed or, more amazingly, found an old set of cards. I’ve seen Renaissance and later catalogs of mechanical motions, for example, containing illustrations much like the two above. Books about machine design contained that kind of visual catalog of machines into the twentieth centiry.
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