What is the oldest BluePrint?
Samuel Coleman
Updated on April 24, 2026
The Plan of St. Gall, is one of the oldest known surviving architectural plans. Some historians consider this 9th century drawing as the very beginning of the history of blueprints.
When was the first blueprint created?
A History of the BlueprintBlueprints were invented a generation before the Civil War by John Herschel, a chemist, astronomer, and photographer, in 1842. Herschel developed the cyanotype process that started with a drawing on semi-transparent paper, weighted down on top of a sheet of paper.