The word blueprint

[Kriton Kyrimis]

ANDERS CHRISTIAN:

> Why is it call blueprints btw? They are of course blue in the story,
> but the normal drawings of houses that I've seen, eg. my fathers and
> the cantina going to be to build in our school, are white with black
> lines. any special reason for them to be blue?

Before the age of photocopiers, plotters, and laser printers, engineering
drawings could be reproduced relatively inexpensively using a process
that would result in white drawings on a blue background. Blueprints
were called that way because they were actually blue!

I saw this discussed in Walter Miller Jr.'s "A Canticle for Leibowitz"
(highly recommended reading). The story takes place in the distant future,
after a nuclear holocaust, where the church had canonized an engineer from
the fifties. A group of monks was painstakingly copying all his writings,
including his blueprints, which they would copy by hand using blue ink!

	Kriton	(e-mail: kyrimis at cti.gr)
	      	(WWW:    http://dias.cti.gr/~kyrimis)
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"The end result had to be what we abstract theoreticians call `kerbang'."
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