Testing airplane fabrics
A 1924 NASA technical report, catalogued from the NASA Technical Reports Server, on how aircraft fabrics were tested for strength and deflection. The pictures are engineering line drawings of test rigs and graphs, showing a fabric panel with dimensioned sections, a lever-and-dial measuring device, a loaded test frame, and a chart of stress curves in kilograms per metre. A designer could take from them the clean, schematic vocabulary of mid-century technical diagrams: thin black linework, dashed construction lines, and labelled dimensions.
