Saint's Log

Brief History of Engineering Drawings

I have been learning a little bit about print reading from this book: Print Reading for Industry: Brown, Walter C., Brown, Ryan K.: 9781645646723: Amazon.com: Books. It briefly mentions blueprints as one of the earliest printmaking processes, the diazo process, and finally wide-format printers (I think today is the first time I’m really noticing the latter). This piqued my interest in the history of blueprints. This video provided the highlights: famed polymath John Herschel invented blueprints using Potassium ferrocyanide and Ammonium ferric citrate. The method is called Cyanotype.

He mentions other methods developed by Alphonse Louis Poitevin – Wikipedia and others. Perhaps those are worth exploring at some point. The chemistry behind blueprints warrants deeper exploration but I’ll save that for another day. There are many videos on cyanotype, e.g. this one on How to Make Blueprints – Cyanotype (youtube.com):

Engineering drawings are now commonly created using CAD software. Drawings commonly conform to standards such as ASME Y14.3-2012 or ISO 5456-2:1996. They are commonly transferred and viewed electronically in formats like PDF. This video summarizes the history of PDF format:

I’ll end this (super) brief history of engineering drawings with a video (from the search for blueprint history) from 1958. It attempts to motivate students about the importance of learning how to read prints (engineering drawings) and although it feels dated, the underlying points are still relevant.