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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;gsalexan, post: 2875958, member: 24274&quot;]This reminded me of a question Midas1 brought up earlier that was never quite answered: How were engravings reduced so precisely? I&#039;ll attach an image as an example. You can see that Mercury and the man with the wheel were both reduced from full-sized vignettes above, to about 90 and 80 percent, respectively, on the Pennsylvania Railroad vignette.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]688354[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>I asked around and learned there are two ways this could have been done.</p><p><br /></p><p>One would have been to use a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph" rel="nofollow">pantograph machine</a>. This is a mechanical device that can be used to reduce or enlarge drawings. However, in the bank note industry this was most often used with letter engraving, with a milling machine attached to the pantograph. Pre-designed typestyle forms could be sized to fit whatever product was being engraved. But this would be a difficult method to use when trying to reproduce fine lines on a portrait or vignette.</p><p><br /></p><p>More likely the process was partially photographic. A photographic reduction was used to create an image of the figure, which was then etched onto a steel plate. The engraver would still have to touch it up by hand because the finest lines always drop out in photos. This process worked best when the reductions were no less than 65 percent. Smaller than that and the lines become so fine that many don&#039;t reproduce at all, at which point it&#039;s more practical to engrave a new, smaller image by hand.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now days all this can be done with computer software and ultra-high resolution scans.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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