Find the following words in a dictionary and memorize their meaning

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3. Read the text. 
Christopher Dresser, who was born in Glasgow in 1834, and who died in 
1904, is the first industrial designer. Significantly, however, Dresser is associ-
ated solely with domestic items, not with the products of heavy industry. 
Whereas the designers who had preceded him fell into three categories – they 
were architects, amateurs who made their designs ad hoc, or artisans and en-
gineers turned designers as a result of practical experience in the workshop – 
Dresser received a much more academic training, of a kind then just becoming 
available. He studied at the Government School of Design at Somerset House, 
London, from 1847 to 1854. 
There were other significant aspects of Dresser's education. He had a 
strongly scientific bent, and studied as a botanist, writing books and papers on 
this subject. 
His scientific studies led to an interest in the relationship between natural 
forms and ornament –
this was the subject of his first important series of arti-
cles, published in the “Art Journal” of 1857. In a more general sense, they 
clearly pointed him towards a rational and logical approach to practical prob-
lems of design. 
Where ornament was concerned, Dresser opposed the then-flourishing 
‘naturalistic’ school. For him, plant forms had to be conventionalized in order 
to be useful to the designer. But botany, where Dresser was concerned, was 
more than simply a source of shapes and patterns. In his own phrase, plants 
demonstrated ‘fitness for purpose’, or ‘adaptation’. He was thus linked, from 
an intellectual point of view, with early nineteenth-century utilitarianism. 
Darwin was Dresser’s contemporary, and announced his theory of natural se-
lection in 1859, when Dresser was beginning his career. Though the latter ap-
parently stopped short of embracing Darwin’s ideas when they were first an-
nounced, they certainly influenced him in the long run. 
From 1862 onwards Dresser’s practice as a freelance designer started to 
blossom. It was in this year that he published his first book on design, “The 
Art of Decorative Design”. His business interests eventually expanded beyond 
this. In 1876 and 1877 he paid an extensive visit to Japan, and made a large 
collection of Japanese objects, some of which were later sold through the firm 
of Tiffany in New York. In 1879 he entered into partnership with Charles 
Holmes of Bradford, later the founder of the “Studio” magazine. They had a 
wholesale warehouse that imported oriental goods. When this partnership 
came to an end, Dresser was already involved in a new venture – the Art Fur-
nishers' Alliance, founded in 1880 'for the purpose of supplying all kinds of 
artistic house-furnishing material, including furniture, carpets, wall-
decorations, hangings, pottery, table-glass, silversmiths' wares, hardware and 

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whatever is necessary to our household requirements'. The venture was not a 
financial success, but it was recognized at the time as something pioneering 
because it tried to reach a popular audience in a way which had not been at-
tempted before. The one self-imposed restriction, and this was a significant 
one, was that implied by the repeated use of words such as ‘artistic’ and ‘art-
manufacture’. The cultivated middle class was attempting to find a practical 
way of instructing those less fortunate than itself, but still with a determination 
not to modify its own standards.
Dresser’s own surviving designs cover a wide range of materials, styles 
and techniques. He worked, for instance, for the Coalbrookdale Company, 
making designs for domestic items in cast iron. Dresser also made designs for 
glass, and a large number for ceramics. He worked briefly for Wedgwood, and 
did a much larger series of designs for Minton. A big collection of his water-
colour designs can be found in the Minton archives, and a number of Minton 
pieces decorated with these survive.
He had better luck with the Linthorpe Art Pottery, founded in 1879 chiefly 
as a vehicle for Dresser’s ideas. At Linthorpe, factory production methods were 
used – the pottery was inexpensive, and was manufactured on a large scale. The 
emphasis was on original shapes, rather than elaborate surface decoration. 
Dresser turned for inspiration to all kinds of historical sources – Pre-Columbian 
pottery, as well as Chinese and Japanese ceramics. Some pieces even look as if 
they were inspired by the Minoan civilization that was then still undiscovered, 
and may indeed be based on Helladic and Mycenaean wares. 
Dresser’s most original work was in metal, and was produced for various 
leading firms of Birmingham silversmiths, prominent among them J. W. Hukin 
and J. T. Heath, and Messrs Elkington & Co. These designs are notable for 
their simplicity and their direct use of materials. In addition, they often show 
great originality of form, with strong emphasis on a kind of stripped-down 
geometric purity. Dresser was one of the first to analyse the relationships 
between form and function in a rational way. In his “Principles of Decorative 
Design” (1873) he provided diagrams demonstrating the laws that governed 
the efficient functioning of handles and spouts on jugs and other vessels, such 
as teapots. His own teapots are often extremely distinctive in shape, with em-
phatic slanted handles. The ergonomic and the metaphorical aspects are 
skillfully combined.
Dresser’s metalwork also shows his concern with economical use of mate-
rials. A plain oval sugar bowl has its edges rolled inward to strengthen the 
metal at the rim, so that a thinner gauge can be used. Very often, and indeed 
almost invariably in larger pieces such as soup tureens. Dresser used electro-
plate rather than silver. This was not a reluctant compromise, as it became 

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with other designers, but a deliberate choice, meant to put his wares within the 
financial reach of as many customers as possible. His liking for economy 
expressed itself visually in a famous toast-rack in which the slices of toast are 
held in place by simple uprights which pass through a metal plate to serve as 
legs. In these designs Dresser seems to anticipate the Bauhaus. He anticipates 
it, but he is not a direct ancestor. It is Dresser's surprising success in building 
relationships with industry as it then existed which seems in some ways to iso-
late him from the mainstream of orthodox design history. 

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