What Happened to the Draftsman? Why Drafting Jobs Disappeared

Draftsmen and drafters held over 345,000 American jobs in 1984, two decades after Sketchpad. Within a generation the drawing board was gone, though not for the reason most people remember. A drafter turned an engineer's rough sketch into the formal drawing a shop or building crew worked from, using vellum, a parallel bar and an ammonia blueprint machine. Early computer-aided design did not empty those rooms. Federal handbooks reported few if any layoffs, and headcount climbed from about 313,000 in 1974 to its 1984 peak. The trade faded once engineers and architects could draw for themselves. Inside this video: 1963 - Sketchpad and drawing on a screen with a light pen 1974 - The tracers, detailers and checkers of the drafting room 1982 - AutoCAD arrives at Comdex with a $1,000 list price 1984 - Why the government found almost no CAD layoffs at the peak 1990 - The Boeing 777, an airliner designed without paper drawings If you ever slid a parallel bar down its wires, tell us about the drafting room you remember in the comments. A trade rarely ends when a machine learns the work; it ends when the people it served start doing that work themselves. Subscribe for more quiet histories of work the computer absorbed. Sources: Occupational Outlook Handbook, 1986-87 Edition (Bulletin 2250) - U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1986: https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/p... Computerized Manufacturing Automation: Employment, Education, and the Workplace - U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, 1984: https://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk3/1984/... The Autodesk File - John Walker, Autodesk company documents, 1982-1994: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/ Reflections on a 50-year career, draftsman Tony Wendricks looks back - Space Science and Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2017: https://www.ssec.wisc.edu/news/articles/10444 #Draftsman #Drafters #DraftingTable #HandDrafting #AutoCAD #Blueprints #ComputerAidedDesign #EngineeringHistory #ArchitectureHistory #JobsTheComputerAte Disclaimer: The voiceover used in this video was generated using AI.