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 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 one of the founders of the Royal Astronomical Society. He was awarded the Copley Medal in for his contributions to chemistry and the physics of light within mathematics.
He helped develop systematic studies of the Sun's importance to astrophysicists. Thirteen years before the Civil War started, Herschel developed a process called Cyanotype, the birth of blueprinting.
The process, called cyanotype , was adopted by early photographers and led to the first book illustrated by photography and then became the darling of architects and engineers.
Here's how it works: First, you create a drawing and transfer it to vellum paper or tracing cloth, both of which are so thin they are practically see-through. Then, you saturate a piece of regular paper with an ammonium potassium mixture and let it dry. Place the drawing atop the paper coated in the chemical solution, expose the papers to a bright light and wait for a chemical reaction to take place.
Within a matter of minutes, the chemical-coated paper will be transformed into blue ferric ferrocyanide -- with one important exception. Wherever the light can't shine through the top paper because of the lines from the original drawing , the blueprinting paper remains white. After rinsing the paper in cold water to halt the chemical reaction and allowing the paper to dry in the dark, you're left with a nearly identical duplicate of the original drawing.
The reproduction is a negative image that appears white against a background turned a specific shade of indigo by the reaction of the chemical compound. Although the process requires several steps, it became a big hit with the pre-computer crowd of the 19th and 20th centuries; it was still faster and cheaper than creating large-scale drawings by hand [sources: Pendle , Soniak ].
The story of the creation of Prussian blue has all the elements of a dark fairy tale. In , an alchemist and a dye-maker shared a laboratory in Berlin, Germany. The former, Johann Konrad Dippel, sought to create a universal remedy -- one that treated everything from animal mange to human epilepsy -- by boiling hooves, horns and leather into a smelly elixir. The latter, a fellow named Diesbach, made batches of vibrant dyes. One day, as Diesbach simmered insects, alum, iron and sulfate to create a deep red, he added some potash borrowed from the alchemist's elixir and added it to his viscous mixture.
This horrible brew created a blue as deep as the night sky. After retracing the steps in the process, Dippel realized the potash contained ox blood that when mixed with iron sulfate caused a chemical reaction and turned a brilliant shade of blue.
The blueprinting process was developed in the mids, when scientists discovered that ammonium iron citrate and potassium ferrocyanide created a photosensitive solution that could be used for reproducing documents. The process goes like this: Someone creates a drawing on translucent tracing paper or cloth.
Once it dries, developers expose the chemical-coated paper to bright light, where the necessary chemical reactions react to form an insoluble blue compound, ferric ferrocyanide.
The transformation occurs with one vital exception, i. It created a solid blue document with vivid white lines. Soon, the diazo white press and xerox copiers came about, and they created solid black or grey lines on white paper. Also known as dry blueprinting as both the processes are quite similar in technology and methods. In diazo, Ferro-gallate coats the paper, turning it into a yellowish shade. Just like blueprinting, the light-sensitive paper is placed underneath the original drawing.
After this, ammonia vapor helps imprint the image on paper. By the s, engineers discovered that Diazo worked better and faster on a blue-lined paper.
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