The making of Silhouettes was a cheap, and quick way to make likenesses of friends, family and loved ones and was incredibly popular (my family has in our heirlooms some of these types of 19th century silhouettes - in large format, and miniature, and even in pre-"no child left behind" grade school it was a typical activity for us to make silhouettes at least once or twice) -
they came in sizes from miniature to life size and bigger. and it was a way to cherish loved ones - in the way that we carry a picture of our partner in our wallet, or have a picture of our kids on our desk at work.
The Physiognotrace, invented by 1783 in Gilles-Louis Chretien, was a machine that mechanized this process. sort of a combination of a pantograph and a puppet show theater - it enabled artists in their studios valuable assistance in churning out what for many was an income mainstay/ When the machine Immigrated to The United States it encountered improvements by John Isaac Hawkins, and was produced and marketed by Polymathic Painter-Curator-Statesman Charles Wilson Peale ~
Thomas Jefferson, of course - from the benefit of his Panopticon of Monticello - always abreast of the comings and goings - and the latest technology, for which he had a voracious appetite for - was well apprised of the Physiognotrace by Peale, who also held patents for the Polygraph Duplicating Machine, generally attributed as the first copying machine invented by Thomas Jefferson himself, who was in fact informed of it via drawing sent to him by Hawkins and Peale and made improvements to the machine which enabled the preservation of his Vast Correspondence now held in the Jefferson Paper Collection at the Library of Congress in Washington D.c.
"A silhouette (English: /ˌsɪluˈɛt/ SIL-oo-ET,[1] French: [silwɛt]) is the image of a person, animal, object or scene represented as a solid shape of a single colour, usually black, with its edges matching the outline of the subject. The interior of a silhouette is featureless, and the silhouette is usually presented on a light background, usually white, or none at all. The silhouette differs from an outline, which depicts the edge of an object in a linear form, while a silhouette appears as a solid shape. Silhouette images may be created in any visual artistic media,[2] but were first used to describe pieces of cut paper, which were then stuck to a backing in a contrasting colour, and often framed."
~"Silhouette," Wikipedia Article.
So one could see how when there was essentially an industry for silhouettes, before Photography became affordable (with the carte de' visite) and paper prints - as well as tin types, caused the silhouette to be pushed out of the mainstream into a tired obsolescence.
that having a machine that could basically take a process that takes 4o minutes and reduce it to minutes, as well as to trace the resultant image onto both paper And a copper plate from which it could be printed endlessly.
I hope you are enjoying these little journeys into these wondrous machines from bygone eras, some from the recent past, as much as I have enjoyed discovering them over the decades of my wonderings, and stored for future reference in the Wunderkammer inside of my Skull - - -
Yours,
Kody J. Bosch
Molson, Washington
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiognotrace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silhouette
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Willson_Peale
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph_(duplicating_device)
https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/polygraph
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Isaac_Hawkins