From Craftsman to Crank-Turner: The Factory Machines of Félibien, Diderot, and Roubo (1676–1775)

From Craftsman to Crank-Turner: The Factory Machines of Félibien, Diderot, and Roubo (1676–1775)

The hundred years between 1676 and 1775 saw the ripple molding machine undergo a transformation that mirrored — and in some ways anticipated — the larger industrial revolution that would reshape European manufacturing in the following century. What began as a bench tool requiring a skilled craftsman’s hands became a self-contained factory workstation that could be operated by anyone who could turn a crank.

The story of this transformation is told through three remarkable French publications, each more detailed than the last, and each documenting a machine that was more complex than its predecessor while demanding less from the person running it.

André Félibien and the First Crank (1676)

André Félibien (1619–1695) was not a craftsman. He was an architect, art theorist, and historiographer to Louis XIV — a courtier-intellectual who moved in the orbit of the Sun King’s Versailles. His Des Principes de l’Architecture, de la Sculpture, de la Peinture (1676) was a comprehensive treatise on the arts that included, among much else, a description of a wave-molding machine that represented a decisive break from the hand-pulled devices of Moxon and Kaseman.

Félibien’s innovation was mechanical: he replaced the operator’s pulling hand with a cogwheel engaging a rack on the moving bed. The operator turned a crank handle, which rotated the cogwheel, which advanced the bed (carrying the stock piece and its guide template) under the fixed blade. A spring-loaded blade with screw-down depth control allowed progressive cuts without the operator needing to judge depth by feel.

This sounds like a modest change, but its implications were profound. In Moxon’s device, the operator controlled everything — speed, direction, pressure, depth advancement. The quality of the finished molding was inseparable from the operator’s skill. In Félibien’s machine, the crank mechanism controlled speed and direction automatically. The spring controlled blade pressure. The screw controlled depth. The operator’s job was reduced to turning the handle and occasionally adjusting the depth screw.

Félibien’s machine was the first to separate the machine’s intelligence from the operator’s intelligence. The wave pattern still came from the physical template — that hadn’t changed. But the act of transferring that pattern to wood was now governed by gears and springs rather than by the craftsman’s hands. The operator no longer needed to be skilled. He just needed to be present.

Diderot’s Encyclopédie: The Machine Perfected (1751–1772)

The great Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers — the monumental project of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert — is rightly celebrated as one of the crowning achievements of the Enlightenment. Published between 1751 and 1772, with supplementary volumes of plates (the Recueil de planches) appearing through the 1770s, it aimed to document all of human knowledge, with particular attention to the practical arts and trades.

The Encyclopédie devoted detailed plates to woodworking trades, including a plate under “Sculpture en bois” (wood sculpture) that showed frame workshop operations — carvers and joiners producing panels, sculptures, and picture frames, along with gilding and finishing. Among the technical illustrations was a wave-molding machine that Thornton reproduces as Fig. 4 in his paper: a substantially more complex device than anything Moxon described.

The Diderot machine was a refined version of Félibien’s concept, fully evolved into a self-contained workstation. Its key features:

A full moving bed or table that carried the stock piece back and forth under the fixed blade. This was not a slide-board clamped in a bench vise — it was an integrated table mounted on its own frame, running on guides, advanced by a rack-and-pinion mechanism.

A spring-loaded blade with screw-down depth control. The spring maintained constant downward pressure on the blade, ensuring consistent cut depth across the full length of the stock piece. The screw allowed the operator to progressively increase the maximum depth between passes, taking thin shavings each time until the desired profile was achieved.

A pattern template running against a follower. This was mechanically identical to the template-and-follower system used in every previous wave-molding device dating back to Schwanhardt, but it was now integrated into a larger, more rigid, more precisely engineered mechanism.

A crank mechanism that advanced the bed. The operator turned a handle. That was essentially the extent of his contribution to the process.

The machine in the Encyclopédie plates was not a bench tool. It was furniture — a dedicated piece of workshop equipment that occupied floor space and required no other infrastructure (no workbench vise, no separate clamping arrangement). It was self-contained in the way that a lathe or a printing press is self-contained.

Where to see the Diderot plates today: the ARTFL Encyclopédie Project at the University of Chicago (encyclopedie.uchicago.edu) has the entire work digitized and searchable for free. The Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Gallica digital library (gallica.bnf.fr) hosts original scans. A Dover edition, A Diderot Pictorial Encyclopedia of Trades and Industry, is available as a free download from the Internet Archive.

André-Jacob Roubo: The Working Craftsman’s Testament (1769–1775)

If Félibien was a courtier and Diderot was a philosopher, André-Jacob Roubo (1739–1791) was something different entirely: a working Paris joiner and cabinetmaker who wrote from inside the trade rather than observing it from outside.

Roubo’s L’Art du Menuisier (“The Art of the Joiner”), published in four parts between 1769 and 1775, is the most comprehensive woodworking treatise ever written. It runs to over a thousand pages with hundreds of engraved plates, covering everything from basic joinery to elaborate cabinetmaking in exotic woods. It is the work of a man who spent his days at the bench and his evenings at the writing desk, and it carries an authority that purely literary accounts cannot match.

The wave-molding machine appears in Part 3, Section 3 — L’Art du Menuisier Ébéniste — the section devoted to cabinetmaking in expensive and exotic materials like ebony. This placement is itself significant: Roubo understood the wave-molding machine as a tool of the ébéniste, the specialist worker in luxury woods, not of the ordinary joiner. It was equipment for high-end production.

Roubo’s description and plates show a machine that is essentially an evolved version of what appeared in the Encyclopédie, with the refinements and practical details that only a working craftsman would think to include. The machine operates on identical principles — moving bed, fixed spring-loaded scraper, template and follower, crank drive — but Roubo’s treatment benefits from the perspective of a man who had actually used such equipment, not merely observed it.

Lost Art Press has published a partial English translation, With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture, which includes Jonathan Thornton’s essay connecting Moxon, Roubo, and Diderot in the technological lineage. It’s an excellent companion to the original plates, which can be accessed for free through Gallica.

The Capsule History

Jonathan Thornton, surveying this hundred-year arc from Félibien through Roubo, offered what may be the most concise summary of the larger trend at work:

As machines grew in complexity, the necessary skills of the operator declined.

This is the trajectory in miniature. The Kaseman plane (c. 1630) required a woodworker who could push a molding plane with precision. Moxon’s Waving Engine (1678) required a craftsman who could pull a stock piece through a cutter with controlled hand pressure and judgment. Félibien’s crank machine (1676) required someone who could turn a handle and adjust a screw. The Diderot/Roubo machines (1750s–1770s) required a crank-turner and nothing more.

Each step transferred intelligence from the operator to the machine. What lived in Schwanhardt’s hands in 1600 — the feel of the cut, the judgment of depth, the sense of how the grain was responding — was progressively encoded into mechanical systems: springs for pressure, screws for depth, gears for feed rate, templates for pattern.

The trade-off was real. The factory machines could produce consistent, repeatable moldings at higher volume with less-skilled labor. They democratized production — you no longer needed years of training to produce a competent ripple molding. But the subtle, alive quality of a hand-pulled Moxon cut — that almost-but-not-quite-perfect regularity that catches candlelight so beautifully — was lost. The factory machines produced moldings that were more uniform and less interesting.

This is not nostalgia. It is a measurable difference in surface character, visible under raking light, that conservators and reproduction framemakers recognize immediately. The 1642 Designs workshop, which operates both a traditional follower-based waving engine and a CNC version, notes that their period-accurate work shows “authentic hand-scraped textures and slight imperfections found in the originals” — imperfections that are features, not defects, and that the factory machines of the 18th century had already begun to eliminate.

The Template Endures

What did not change across this entire century of evolution was the pattern-and-follower principle. Félibien’s cogwheel, Diderot’s rack-and-pinion, Roubo’s spring-loaded scraper — all of these were improvements to the mechanism, not to the logic. The logic remained what it had been since Schwanhardt: a shaped template controls the movement of a cutter relative to the workpiece, and the cutter transfers the template’s pattern to the wood.

The template was where the design intelligence lived. The craftsman who carved the original template — shaping its sinuous curves, setting its wavelength and amplitude, choosing its profile — was the true designer. Everything downstream, whether powered by a craftsman’s hands or a crank-turner’s arm, was reproduction.

This is a point worth dwelling on, because it connects directly to the modern era. When the intelligence moved from hand-carved wooden templates to digital cam profiles and G-code, the fundamental relationship didn’t change. The template is still the seat of design. The machine is still the means of reproduction. What changed is the medium in which the template exists — from carved wood to stored data — and the precision with which the reproduction can be controlled.

But that is a story for a later post.

 

Sources:

• Jonathan Thornton, “The History and Technology of Waveform Moldings: Reproducing and Using Moxon’s ‘Waving Engine,’” WAG Postprints, 2002. Free PDF at wag-aic.org.
• André Félibien, Des Principes de l’Architecture, de la Sculpture, de la Peinture (1676).
• Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–1772). Plates in the Recueil de planches. Free at encyclopedie.uchicago.edu (ARTFL Project) and gallica.bnf.fr.
• A Diderot Pictorial Encyclopedia of Trades and Industry, Dover edition. Free at archive.org.
• André-Jacob Roubo, L’Art du Menuisier (1769–1775). Original plates free at gallica.bnf.fr.
• With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture (Lost Art Press), with essay by Jonathan Thornton.
• 1642 Designs, “About” page (1642designs.com/about).
• Lynn Roberts, The Frame Blog — notes on “Sculpture en bois” plates in Diderot.