‘Reconstruction’ and interpreting written instructions: what making a seventeenth-century plane table revealed about the independence of readers

This paper reports the experience of reconstructing a surveying instrument—the plane table—using the description found in Arthur Hopton’s Speculum topographicum: or The topographicall glasse (1611): ‘Of the Plaine Table, with a description thereof, and the parts thereunto belonging’. One of the most detailed early printed descriptions of the instrument, it is illustrated with woodcut diagrams of components but no image of the complete plane table. The reconstruction process did not prove entirely straightforward. An examination of its various stages reveals how Hopton’s text set out to persuade and lead the reader, rather than issuing orders to be followed exactly; the reader, left to make some decisions himself, would thus create a plane table with an element of uniqueness in its character. The role of the maker of such an instrument, even when following written instructions, was a creative and collaborative one, rather than purely passive.