From the beginning of the nineteenth century many people experimented with new kinds of printing that were often radically different from the established craft methods of letterpress, copper plate engravings, or woodcuts. These experimenters were not associated with the traditional print trades but were instead a varied group of amateurs and entrepreneurs who wanted to apply technological and scientific innovation to production and manufacture. Photography and lithography are just two of the new printing methods that came out of these often haphazard attempts to explore the chemistry, physics and mechanics of nature, and hopefully, to turn some profit from them. This constant reverberation of invention forms a background rumble to the development of printing and copying techniques, such as blueprinting, that were an adjunct to technical drawing, serving factory production, construction, and the growth of mechanical engineering.

Notions of industrialization, printing, and exact replication became intertwined and fed off each other to create an industrial ideal. Many of the prophets and promoters of the ‘machine dreams’ of industrialisation in the nineteenth century such as Charles Babbage used ideas taken from the specialist craft of printing and applied them as an extended metaphor to describe the virtues of the entire factory system; the ‘stereotype’ being one particular favourite of his that has now become a common cliche. Just as the industrial and mechanical aim was to replicate an endless series of things in the factory, so the process of designing machines and structures also used copying techniques to build in repeatability. Technical drawings were made to be copied and passed around, that was one of their functions. The first methods of copying images relied on drawing tools such as compasses and rulers. These mechanical means were later supplemented with different chemical and photomechanical techniques that were tried out in the working environments of the factories and construction projects of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Early on, James Watt insisted on copying and storing all his industrial drawings; at first these were laboriously copied by hand, but in 1780 he patented and marketed his copy press that used the simple chemistry of writing ink to create the flimsy but indelible multiple copies of letters and technical drawings that now pad out the vast Boulton & Watt Archive in Birmingham. So, the copy press helped to solve an in-house problem of how to copy and archive company data, but it was also, as a gadget to sell for office use, a commercial opportunity. Engineers did not just work on large machines or landmark projects; they also busied themselves with technologies of print and image reproduction, producing on the one hand mechanical aids such as pantographs, on the other, by finding applications for chemical and physical inventions, such as the actinograph, a photographic device that measured light levels. After the invention of photography in the 1830s, photographic techniques were tried out in many printing experiments, using light-sensitive chemicals to transfer images to make photolithographic plates or for etching into metal in the example of photogravure. Photographic techniques of image transfer came to dominate standard carbon-based printing in the twentieth century, but these techniques were still part of the printing industries, and largely separate from the enormous photographic enterprises that also emerged in of the twentieth century. But away from the mainstream of the printing and publishing industries, we can see the development an almost equally extensive but hidden ‘print culture’ in the offices and workshops of the vast nineteenth century industrial-imperial enterprises in the late nineteenth century, using such arcane paraphernalia as the dyeline printer, the cyclostyle and the jellygraph. This is the murky world in which the notion of blueprints came to mean ‘master plan’.