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Home>Explore The Museum>Voices in the Museum>The Drawing Office - Pen and Ink to Computer Aided Design> Draftsmen and Tracers - designing with pen and ink

The Drawing Office - Pen and Ink to Computer Aided Design

Draftsmen and Tracers - designing with pen and ink

Oliver Dearden tells us about the process of hand drawing aircraft designs

Make sure your volume is on: "...to multiply you went away from you, towards you to divide..."

Show transcript

‘Everybody’s at a desk with a keyboard and a screen. We had a great big desk, and you had lots of paper, we had a slide rule and a pencil, and that’s how aircraft were designed, and if necessary you could get hold of a calculator. Some were hand calculators, on which, to multiply you went away from you, towards you to divide; it added going that way, and it subtracted going this way.’
‘The draftsmen would do the drawings on tracing paper with pencil, and do all the details, but then to make it into a proper working drawing it would be traced in ink on linen, so that then it could be put through the print machines, and you could produce copies of it.’

Credit: Filton Community History
If you would like to hear more Filton Community History oral recordings please contact Gloucestershire Archives.

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