What Ever Happened to Blueprints?

 

If you have been in this business for a few decades, you started out working with blueprints. Just about any field drawing you came across was a blueprint. If you are fairly new to the electrical industry, odds are you have never seen a blueprint. You may be wondering why old timers use that word.

 

Blueprints bear that name because they are actually blue because of the ammonia used to make them. So much ammonia, that they reek of it. But that's not the only reason blueprints have mostly (or perhaps completely) disappeared in the construction industry (and others).

 

The shift to ink printing of drawings began in the late1970s, essentially using a photocopier process to print small (A-size, B-size, and C-size) drawings from slides rather than full size masters kept in drawers. Even in nuclear power plants, this was standard by the early 1980s. For construction, blueprints continued to be used because wide-frame printers just were too expensive.

 

But the C and smaller drawings were black and white by that time. It was faster and cheaper to print on demand than to have the blueprint room pull out a master and bake you a copy.

 

By the mid-1980s, HP had released a series of wide-frame printers that could handle anything up to an E-size print. They did it in color, they did it fast.

 

Today, we don't have draftsmen (and thus the drafting table has disappeared). We have CAD techs and we have engineers producing drawings (typically not to CAD standards, which is a huge problem).

 

We haven't just dropped the "blue" from "blueprint," though. We have pretty much dropped the print part, at least before we get out to the field. Drawings are typically transmitted electronically, updated electronically, and reviewed electronically. One drawing may hold dozens of versions, each accessible by turning layers on and off.

 

That's a trick we used to do with transparencies and prints.

 

Drawings are printed for the field, but there is pressure to do away with that. Having worked in the field for years, I'm not convinced a paperless construction site is a good idea. But it has its appeal. Now instead of having to worry about version control of paper copies (a major administrative headache), the move is toward mobile devices that display a drawing on the screen.

 

However, this brings other headaches, such as how to see the stupid thing in sunlight or how to read your drawing after a pipe fitter drops a 12-inch pipe-wrench on it (do that to paper, and it's no problem).

 

In the office, prints have gone from blue to white to increasingly not there at all. A notable exception is the "stamped drawing." A PE's stamp works just fine on paper.

 

As companies increasingly seek to eliminate the cost of paper-based processes, items such as the fax are obvious candidates for "museum only." The paper letter, once a common business tool, is already there. The paper invoice has almost completely joined it--companies that still invoice in this fashion will increasingly find it annoys their customers.

 

There is projection technology on the way that could make paper drawings obsolete, even in the field. Deploying that technology will require substantial capital investment. However, the same situation existed when digital multimeters came on the scene. So the end of paper drawings is probably inevitable. Some day. In the meantime, you will see paper drawings in the field and elsewhere. Even though they aren't really blueprints.

 

 

Mark Lamendola has worked in the electrical industry for over 30 years in jobs ranging from Master Electrician to Electrical Engineer, and also extensively as an author and editor. He operates www.codebookcity.com, which sells code books and related items, and has a library of free code-related articles.