(Rolled Lead Sheeting) Remond de Saint-Albine, (Pierre)

Mémoire sur le laminage du plomb. Troisième édition.

Paris, Jacques Guerin 1746.

Make Enquiry

Full Description

A pamphlet which documents a valiant attempt to achieve improvement in a building trade manufacturing process against entrenched opposition from an existing craft guild. The use of rolled lead sheeting for roofing and guttering, in preference to cast lead (heavier and more difficult to work), commenced in England as early as the 1670s, but it was not until 1729 that the first mill for rolling lead was established in Paris, against fierce opposition from the existing Parisian master plumbers. The present pamphlet, by Pierre Remond de Saint-Albine, of which the first edition appeared in 1731, vigorously argues the case for rolled lead, describing the manufacturing process and printing the text of supportive reports which the author had himself elicited from the Société des Arts, the Académie des Sciences, the Académie d’Architecture, the Fontainiers du Roi, and the French Ambassador in London. As the author explains in his preface, the first edition was issued without accompanying illustrations, and in the present edition this defect is remedied by the presence of three accurate illustrations of the rolling mill, drawn and engraved by an individual named Dheulland, presumably the Guillaume Dheulland responsible for some of the plates in Belidor’s Architecture Hydraulique.