Who?
Anna Atkins. A botanist that made popular a process that surveyors and engineers picked up on rather quickly. Today would be her 216th. birthday. In her career Ms. Adkins began utilizing this contact process of recording plant images, the cyanotype.
"Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints. The process uses two chemicals: ammonium iron(III) citrate and potassium ferricyanide."
We call the process "blueprints" in today's world.
Not to be confused with its ozalid cousin the blueline, blueprints were the standard reproduction in our industry for over a hundred years.
I still think they're cool.
