Michael Cooley (1972) has suggested that the drawing office has been downgraded in importance as a result of the finer division of labor in engineering that began in the 1930s. He described how the creative design element had become increasingly separated from the work of executing drawings. The fragmentation of shop floor jobs was, according to Cooley, paralleled by fragmentation of the job of the designer/drafter. Until the 1930s, drafters in Britain were responsible for designing a component, stress testing it, selecting materials for it, writing the specifications, and liaising with the shop floor and customers. But starting in the 1930s, these functions were progressively broken down into separate jobs and taken over by various specialists, such as stress testers, metallurgists, tribologists, methods and planning engineers, and customer liaison engineers, leaving drafters with only the job of drawing (3D Systems Corporation, 2001).

In effect, in the Britain of the 1930s,...
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