Good stuff that! Puts me in mind of some of the photos that were found in some of the piping catalog / engineering guides that were printed by Tube Turns, Kellogg, Power Piping, et. al. and distribted to the engineering companies.
When I started on the drafting board, the spelling of draughtsman had recently changed to draftsman. There was a cigarette machine nearby the drafting room that dispensed a book of paper matches with each pack. Of course the match book covers had adverts on them and some wag attached one to the company bulletin board that advised ...."earn big money, learn drafting at home"........ Well, at $275.00 per month, that was a good laugh.
In the really "good old days" most of the engineers also worked on drafting boards. We all (drafters and engineers alike) wore dress shirts and ties to work every day (we wore small aprons to keep our clothes clean). My father told me about the 30's and 40's - every city had what was called a "dust level". That was the height above the ground (street level) on a relatively calm day above which the dirt in the air decreased significantly. Because air conditioned offices were unheard of in those days, all the offices had to have open windows to get rid of the cigarette smoke and the smell of a hundred sweating draughtsmen. The idea was to locate the drafting rooms above the "dust level" so as to keep the linen drawings a clean as possible. Pittsburgh was well known for being a dirty city as there were perhaps a dozen steel mills in the area, so all drafting rooms were locate on the seventh floor and higher.
The basic organizational unit in the drafting room was the "squad". A squad comprised about 12 to 14 MEN (female drafters were unheard of). The squad was arranged in two rows of drafting boards with the "squad leader" and "assistant squad leader" (to his left) at the back (a squad leader MIGHT have a telephone). Immediately in front of the squad leader was two rows of "checkers" (four in total). Immediately in front of them were four rows of "draftsmen". Immediately in front of them was a row of two "inkers" (these were the guys who would go over the previously checked linen drawings made with graphite pencils and "ink-in" all the lines, dimension, notes, etc). The inkers worked with "ruling pens" and India ink and this took a steady hand. Immediately in front of them were one or two rows of "scrubbers" who would make corrections to drawings that were required by the "checkers". The term "scrubbing" referred to the erasures that were required in order to make the corrections. The more accomplished "scrubbers" were sometimes assigned to starting drawings by lightly laying down the "background" so that the draftsmen could take these and finish them by drawing in the actual "work" that was the focus of each drawing. The worst thing you could say about a "would-be-drafter" was "he draws out-of-scale". If the "scrubber" did not have the rows and columns (part of the "background" on a plan) drawn-in exactly in-scale the draftsman would notice quickly and curse him out and the squad leader would take note - this might delay the "scrubber's" promotion by six months. Of course there was a trick to that - every vertical line that you would draw would "pull" the right and left edges of the linen drawing closer together. And, every horizontal line that you would draw would "pull" the top and bottom edges of the drawing closer together.
The lines that were drawn first would be "pulled" out-of-scale by the act of drawing every line after. So the poor inexperienced "would-be-drafter" would find that in short order his drawing would be out-of-scale and he would be in trouble. The pay structure was known to all for each of these squad "positions". The pay structure would vary according to "engineering discipline" with the piping drafters (and associates) being the highest paid.
Well, I guess maybe the "good old days" really were not so good.
