Posts Tagged drawings
As you might expect, a car company with as long a life and as many different vehicles in production at various times as Ford Motor Company needed to document down to individual nuts and bolts each part of each vehicle. Over the 50 years between 1903 and 1957, Ford produced more than one million parts drawings, a comprehensive microfiche set of which now reside in The Henry Ford’s Benson Ford Research Center. We’ve just digitized several hundred of these parts drawings, including a couple dozen, like this one, that cover Model T ambulances built by Ford to be used during World War I.
Go online to learn more about our parts drawings holdings, or browse all the digitized Ford parts drawings in our Digital Collections.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Europe, Michigan, 1910s, 20th century, World War I, Model Ts, Ford Motor Company, drawings, digital collections, cars, by Ellice Engdahl, archives
Elizabeth Parke Firestone (1897–1990) was the wife of Harvey S. Firestone, Jr., son of the founder of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. As a well-heeled and fashion-conscious woman, she both traveled to and corresponded with many famous couture houses in Paris, including the House of Dior.
An inquiry from Dior last year led to our digitization of many of the articles of Christian Dior clothing in our collection that belonged to Mrs. Firestone, but when we dug even further, we turned up over 370 Dior design drawings, mostly dating from the 1950s. Many, like the 1955 “Fête a Trianon,” are intricately colored, and include handwritten notes and fabric swatches, giving potential customers a taste of their glamour. Visit our Digital Collections to peruse all of these Dior design drawings.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
drawings, design, Firestone family, Elizabeth Parke Firestone, women's history, fashion, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl
The Henry Ford receives inquiries from around the world and from all types of individuals and organizations about the contents of our collections. Recently, we were approached by Christian Dior Couture about the Dior garments, accessories, and drawings we hold. As we investigated and located these items, we digitized many of them, including this 1950s pillbox hat owned and worn by Elizabeth Parke Firestone. Now anyone can view dozens of Dior-related artifacts on our collections website. And while we’ve digitized all the Dior design drawings that relate to specific garments in our collections, we hold dozens more Dior drawings, which we’ll be digitizing over upcoming months—so be sure to check back for even more high fashion in our digital collections.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Europe, 20th century, hats, fashion, drawings, digital collections, design, by Ellice Engdahl
In a recent post on our blog for National Space Day, Digital Access & Preservation Archivist Brian Wilson highlighted a few concept drawings created by the Sundberg-Ferar industrial design firm, in conjunction with Lockheed and NASA, in the early 1980s. As Brian notes, these drawings of a manned space station “considered how the astronauts would perform normal earthbound tasks in the tight quarters of the space station, including the need to exercise, bathe and sleep, and how a near-zero gravity environment would affect those tasks.” The drawings shown here, for example, demonstrate how dining might work in space. If your interest is piqued, you can now browse a couple dozen more of these newly-digitized drawings on our collections website.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
by Ellice Engdahl, space, drawings, digital collections, design
It's usually a safe bet that when someone asks us, "Do you have FILL IN THE BLANK in the collections at The Henry Ford?" odds are pretty good that we do. Today is #NationalSpaceDay and, as you guessed it, we've got space-related artifacts in our collections to share. Digital Access & Preservation Archivist Brian Wilson took a look in our archives and found these designs from Sundberg-Ferar. Take a look. - Lish Dorset is Social Media Manager at The Henry Ford.
In the early 1980s, Detroit-area industrial design firm Sundberg-Ferar, Inc. worked with the Lockheed Corporation and NASA to develop concepts for a manned space station.
Through a series of drawings, including those shown here, Sundberg-Ferar illustrated what life in space could be like for astronauts aboard the station.
The designers considered how the astronauts would perform normal earthbound tasks in the tight quarters of the space station, including the need to exercise, bathe and sleep, and how a near-zero gravity environment would affect those tasks. For example, the shower design features a retractable toe restraint in the floor, while the treadmill uses a waist belt to keep the user in place.
In addition to the space station renderings, our collection of Sundberg-Ferar material includes their work on designs for a variety of other transportation and travel vehicles dating from the 1960s-1980s, including supersonic transport and large passenger jet planes, commuter trains, and rapid transit rail cars used in San Francisco, Washington D.C. and Atlanta.
Brian Wilson is Digital Access & Preservation Archivist at The Henry Ford.
by Brian Wilson, by Lish Dorset, space, drawings, design, archives
The Henry Ford has an active program through which we loan artifacts from our collection, particularly those that we are not actively displaying, to other museums and institutions. We currently have more than 200 objects out on loan, and we digitize each object before it leaves our campus. This week, we’ve digitized a couple of renderings of the Lincoln Futura, including this one. These drawings will be included in a short exhibition at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Mich., along with an already-digitized scale model of the Futura from our collections, beginning in mid-April. If you’re in the metro Detroit area, be sure to check out these artifacts at Lawrence Tech, and if you’re not, keep an eye on our collections website to see what other treasures from Henry’s attic are going on loan.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
events, Michigan, design, Ford Motor Company, 20th century, 1950s, drawings, digital collections, cars, by Ellice Engdahl
It should come as no surprise, given the founder of this institution, that our digital collections already contain hundreds of items related to Henry Ford’s son, Edsel. We’ve just expanded this selection by digitizing some of Edsel’s childhood artwork. My personal favorite is this bear, made of brown thread stitched into paper and likely created when Edsel was between 5 and 10 years old, but other pieces include family portraits, highly geometric works, and slightly later, more sophisticated works. View these and other items related to Edsel Ford in our online collections.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Detroit, Michigan, 19th century, 20th century, 1910s, 1890s, Ford family, Edsel Ford, drawings, digital collections, childhood, by Ellice Engdahl, art
Jens Jensen (1860–1951) was a Danish-born landscape architect who did a large amount of design work for the Ford family and Ford Motor Company. This included Ford Motor Company pavilion landscaping for the 1933–34 Chicago World’s Fair, landscape design for multiple residences of Edsel Ford, and complete landscaping for Fair Lane, the Dearborn estate of Henry and Clara Ford. We’ve just digitized 29 blueprints from the Jens Jensen Drawings Series showing planting plans, grading and topographical plans, and water feature plans for the Fair Lane estate, such as this one for a bird pool. View all related material in our digital collections.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Michigan, Dearborn, Ford family, Clara Ford, home life, 20th century, 1920s, 1910s, Henry Ford, drawings, digital collections, design, by Ellice Engdahl
This year marks the 50th anniversary of an American automotive icon: the Ford Mustang. The Henry Ford counts among its collections three notable Mustangs: the 1962 Mustang I concept car, the first serial number of the 1965 production Mustang, and another 1965 Mustang on display at the Ford Rouge Factory Tour. In addition, our archives include photographs, design drawings (like this one for the 1963 Ford Mustang II prototype), and trade literature from every year of production. Relive the first half-century of the Mustang through the digital collections of The Henry Ford.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Michigan, 21st century, 2010s, 20th century, 1960s, Mustangs, Ford Motor Company, drawings, digital collections, convertibles, cars, by Ellice Engdahl
Back in May, we received a visit to our reading room by a team of engineering students from Penn State, who were touring Greenfield Village. They had been out in the Village helping to install a working replica (but more on that later) of Henry Ford's first experimental engine, the Kitchen Sink Engine. (The original engine, made in 1893, is in our collections storage.) Now they wanted to see what is near and dear to any engineer's heart: the blueprints. We located and pulled the engine's technical drawings, which had been created by Ford Motor Company staff circa 1944 and form part of our Ford Blueprint Drawings collection (just one small part of which is the "Miscellaneous Ford Motor Company Blueprints and Drawings Collection," where these drawings reside.
The engineering students were a rapt audience, and they stayed in the reading room for a while, poring over the drawings, talking to each other about them, and taking pictures. Later, an order was put in for high-resolution scans of the drawings. It turns out that a previous group of students from their course had already created their own replica of the engine, back in 2012 as part of a class project. The Henry Ford has had a replica of the Kitchen Sink Engine on display, but ours is not a working replica. Theirs is -- and that's the really cool thing. We are always pleased when our collections are used in exciting ways that bring the past forward. Icing on the cake for this particular case (maybe the Fates were smiling on us for the 150th anniversary of Henry Ford's birth?), was that with one of the Kitchen Sink Engine drawings, we hit a milestone number for our image scanning: THF100000! (All of the collections images we scan are assigned a unique identification number, in order to make tracking and retrieval possible.) A nice round—and large—number to commemorate an important first in Henry Ford's career! Now we're going to be wondering what THF200000 will be.
See the Penn State Beaver students' working replica of the Kitchen Sink Engine on display at this weekend's Old Car Festival.
archives, Henry Ford, drawings, educational resources, education, engines, engineering
