Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vocal bomb here. If you have a blueprint for success, you're not alone, at least when it comes to the blueprint part. The word blueprint has become part of a global lexicon used to symbolize a plan, strategy, or framework. But what is a blueprint really? At its most basic, a blueprint is a reproduction of an image that already exists.
Engineers or architects use these large format prints to illustrate project plans, using white lines and text on a backdrop of blue. And it's not just because they happen to like the color. A blueprint signature hue is tied to
a chemical process. In eighteen forty two, an English photographer, chemist, and astronomer named John Herschel discovered the combining ferric ammonium citrate and potassium fair cyanide created a chemical reaction and a compound called blue ferric fair sydanide or Prussian blue. This photosensitive solution could be used to reproduces documents in a process similar to developing a photograph from a negative.
The process, called cyana type, 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, then transfer it to vellum paper or tracing cloth, both of which are so thin that light can pass through them. Then you saturate a piece of regular paper with an ammonium potassium
mixture and let it dry. Place the transparent vellum or tracing cloth with the drawing atop the paper coated in the chemical solution, Shine a bright light down through the drawing, and wait for the chemical reaction to take place. Within a matter of minutes, the chemical coated paper will be transformed into blue ferric fairr cyanide, with one important exception, wherever the light can't shine through the top paper because of the lines from the drawing, the blue printing paper
remains white. After rinsing the paper in cold water to halt the chemical action and allowing the paper to dry in the dark, you're left with a nearly identical duplicate of the original drawing, just the lines are white and the background is dark, where the lines were originally dark
and the background was light. Although this process requires several steps, it became a big hit with the pre computer crowd of the nineteen and twenty centuries, as it was still faster and cheaper than creating large scale drawings by hand. The story of the creation of Prussian blue has all the elements of a dark fairy tale. In seventeen o four, an alchemist and a dye maker shared a laboratory in Berlin, Germany.
The former, Johann Konrad Dipple, sought to create a universal remedy, one that treated everything from animal mange to human epilepsy by boiling hoofs, horns, and leather into a smelly elixir. The ladder, a fellow named Teese Box made batches of vibrant dyes. One day, as these, Box simmered insects, alum, iron and sulfate to create a deep red, he borrowed some potash to the alchemist 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, Dipple realized the potash contained ox blood that, when mixed with iron sulfate, caused a chemical reaction and turned a brilliant shade of blue. Unlike other blue dyes that were difficult to make and easily faded. This blue remained vivid, and it was inexpensive. Other blue dyes of the time required ingredients like lapis lazili, which at the time cost more than gold. Initially, Dipple called the color Berlin blue
as a nod to his city of residents. Later it was called Prussian blue because it was used to dye uniform fabric for the Prussian Army. The color became both the symbol of aggression and a term of endearment because of the army's fierce battles and serendipitous interventions and conflicts like the Battle of Waterloo. By the late eighteen hundreds, Prussian blue had found favor with impressionist artists and Japanese printmakers. As the nineteen hundreds wore on, it became the hue
of newspaper inc typewriter ribbon, and eyeshadow. Scientists even discovered Prussian blue works as an antidote to heavy metal poisoning by acting as a magnet to attract and evacuate heavy metals from the bloodstream. Eventually, Prussian blue became as important for its practicality as its novelty. But not While John Herschel was alive to see it. It wasn't until five years after his death that blueprints were recognized as an
inexpensive and simple way to reproduce architectural drawings. By the nineteen seventies, the blue printing process was a dying art in the United States because new technology was becoming more prevalent. Zerographic copies could create duplicates with the push of a button, and by the nine eighties the architecture, engineering, and construction industries were making the move from hand drawing to computer aided design that could be printed on large scale paper. Today,
blueprints aren't usually blue. They're most often black or gray lines on a white background. Today's episode was written by Laurel Dove and produced by a Playing Brain. Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more on this and mons of other original topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com. And for more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.