Translation

While I’m playing with that more-than-hundred-year-old management book…how to reproduce drawings: It occurs to me that most people reading this need one or more terms translated or explained: In addition to “drafter,” there used to be a job called “tracer.” Tracers copied pencil drawings or sketches into ink. That was pretty much gone by the time I started work in 1987, but some people in the office still referred to drawings as “tracings.” What everyone, including me, calls “blueprinting” is official “cyanotype.” It’s basically a form of photography with film (the blueprint paper) that is really bad at picking up images. Ordinary light won’t register an image, but intense UV will. The final print is in ferric ferrocyanide, which is also the dye known as Prussian blue, and the original commercial version of the process in the 1870s used the name “Ferro-prussiate.” The developing process for blueprinting used ammonia, and every architecture and engineering office used to have a…