Before the emergence of computer-assisted design/drafting (CAD), there was pencil on paper. This was Ella Peacock’s world. In an interview conducted by Dr. Sharon Gray, Peacock recounted her career in drafting—the practice of visually describing and communicating the design and operation of objects, circuits, plans, or technologies through a precise and prescribed set of rules. The moment reveals the impressive breadth of Peacock’s oft-overlooked accomplishments in drafting at a time when, as Susan Larson Mumford notes, most drafters were men:
“Also, I [Ella Peacock] worked for mural painter and illustrator George Harding. Then I got a bit sidetracked, took a short drafting course, and had numerous drafting jobs, became a senior draftsman and engineering technician. I liked the work, but should have quit sooner and gone back to painting. I did pressure-vessel, architectural, and electrical drafting, designed and drew up changes to a warehouse for the purpose of manufacturing the Poseidon missile body. Worked on electrical diagram for the sea-going Voice of America. Was offered a job by Bell Laboratories to work on the communications satellite.”
While Peacock frames her work in drafting as a detour from her pursuit of painting, the pressure vessels, electrical diagrams, and warehouse alterations that the artist drafted attest to a talent and experience that deserve to be taken seriously today. In this cutaway view of one pressure vessel, specifically a shell and tube heat exchanger, Peacock used the graphite of her pencil to suggest the metallic sheen and curvature of the cylindrical vessel. The surrounding blank space decontextualizes this pressure vessel from the heavy-duty industrial environment in which it would have likely been situated, allowing the viewer to focus instead on the pipes, tubes, and plates that helped transfer heat between two fluids to either create steam (and thus generate power, such as for a steam engine) or assist in the refining process.
For more information, see Susan Larson Mumford, ed., “Ella Gilmer Smyth Peacock: Spring City’s Resident Saint,” in Worth Their Salt Too: More Notable But Often Unnoted Women of Utah (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2000), 305; 175-176. The MOA is grateful to Dale Tree, Chris Mattson, and Carl Sorensen at the BYU Department of Mechanical Engineering, as well as David Pixton and Greg Nelson at the Harold B. Lee Library, for their input.
