Advertising

Francis Lowthorp, a nineteenth century engineer, has accomplished the feat of having quite a few prints up for sale on Ebay and similar sites. He did this by running, 160 years ago, a gloriously overstuffed ad for his services:

Apparently people like having this framed and hanging on their walls. If you want a version that’s got sufficient resolution to read all the little print – most of which is quotes from clients praising Lowthorp – it can be downloaded from Wikimedia.

To be clear, this ad is quite serious. Compare the top illustration to this HABS photo of Lowthorp’s 1870 Main Street Bridge over the Raritan River in Clinton, New Jersey:

Lowthorp was still promoting the use of hybrid trusses, with cast-iron compression members and wrought-iron tension members, in the 1870s, at a time when engineers in general were using less cast iron because of its brittle failure mode and were, in fact, starting to look at steel. (To get his position in his own words, scroll to page 228 in volume 1, from 1872, of the Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers.) That doesn’t mean he was dumb or a bad engineer, simply that he took a position based on the information available to him at the time that, later on, turned out to be the wrong one.