The History Behind Blueprints
Have you ever been curious about how blueprints are made and their history? Have you ever wondered why they were blue? The answers to these questions and more lies within this blog!
Hello to you, our wonderful readers, and everyone here in the Lowcountry! We hope you've been enjoying our recent string of educational blogs filled with unique and interesting facts about the architectural world! We've been enjoying dusting off our history books and getting back to the basics. We've even learned a new thing or two. While we have continued our educational journey, we have started to feel a little blue. Don't worry, we have just been looking back into the history of architecture and revisiting our roots. Before modern printers, copiers, computers, and computer design programs were a realty, architects lived in a world of blueprints.
Blueprints are still created and drawn to this day, but they are much different than their early predecessors. For one, although they are still called blueprints, the building and design plans are hardly ever blue anymore. If they are, this is strictly a stylized choice. Secondly, almost all design is now done digitally. Don't get us wrong, there are plenty of architects out there that still drawn by hand, loving that physical and tactile feel, but the original beginnings of blueprints have been left in the past as technology has grown and changed over the years.
Before the technology of creating a blueprint came to life, the best way to copy a building plan was to have someone draw you another copy. This could be done by laying a piece of translucent paper on top of the original and tracing it, or having the artist or another skilled hand draw you an exact copy. The first problem with this process was that it took so much time, nothing could be reproduced instantly. Since it took so much time, this also drove up the cost to create a copy. A new form of the copy process was desperately needed, and thanks to photographer, astronomer, chemist, mathematician, and scholar John Herschel, a new process became a reality.
John Herschel was born in 1792 and he succeeded his father, Sir Willam Herschel, in the field of stellar and nebular discovers. Sir William was the man responsible for discovering Uranus. His son, John, quite the brilliant man himself, accomplished quite a bit before inventing blueprints.
He was responsible for finding and naming moons
He studied colorblindness
He was one of the founders of the Royal Astronomical Society
He was awarded the Copley Medal in 1821 for his contributions to chemistry and the physics of light within mathematics
He helped develop systematic studies of the Sun's importance to astrophysicists
He translated The Iliad
And much more!
Thirteen years before the Civil War started, Herschel developed a process called Cyanotype, the birth of blueprinting. To create a blueprint you draw your original design on a semi-transparent piece of paper or cloth, and place it on top of paper that has been treated with a mixture of two chemicals; potassium ferrocyanide and ammonium iron citrate. This is a photosensitive (and very hazardous) chemical mixture. Then, you take the stacked pieces of paper and expose them to bright ultraviolet light (like the sun). The treated paper turns blue, but the lines of the original drawing block out the sun's effects and leave white lines on the treated paper. After only a few minutes of exposure, you are left with a perfect copy. The reaction from the sun causes a compound to appear on the paper called blue ferric ferrocyanide, or Prussian Blue. This is the blue color left behind on the treated paper and why these copied documents came to be known as blueprints. The soluble chemicals would then be washed off, according to New World Encyclopedia, and you would be left with a very stable copy. The process was so effective that by the 1890s, it cost one-tenth of the price to make a blueprint compared to a hand-drawn replication and could be made within a fraction of the time.
About 100 years went by and the process of blueprinting was still going strong. With the dawning of the 1940s, everything changed. Blueprints met their match and were replaced by whiteprints or diazo prints. On a whiteprint, blue lines would appear on white paper. These prints were, as their predictors had been for hand draw copies, much faster and even clearer to read than blueprints. This was then followed by the xerographic print processes (which is similar to today's copy machine) and then this was followed by the creation of computer-aided design - CAD - techniques that took of in the mid-1990s.
Today printing copies of blueprints (yes, even though the process is much different, the term is still used) can still be exorbitantly expensive because every little change requires a new copy. To save a few pennies and time, things have gone digital. Plans are now made on computers and tablets. They can then be shared with any desired party instantly in the form of a PDF. The shared blueprints can be viewed on any smart device and computer without a single piece of paper used. This new process doesn't just help save money in printing costs, it also saves time and gas by not having to drive to a construction site or office to approve each new change or copy. All plans can be shared between working parties to and from their work spaces in a click of a button.
Pretty fascinating, right? We love seeing the timeline of our industry. From the growth and development of new building materials to the history of blueprints, the world of Architecture has an amazing story to tell. What's even more exciting is that the industry still has so many more stories to tell and changes to go through. We are so excited to see what our next chapter is going to look like!