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I was looking at some old city sewer plans from the 1920s and found a hand-drawn rat in the margin
I was digitizing a set of sewer main drawings for a downtown project, stuff from like 1923, and you know how you get into a rhythm just tracing lines. I was on sheet 17, a junction near 5th and Main, and right there in the corner, next to a pipe diameter callout, was this perfect little pencil sketch of a rat. It had little whiskers and everything, just chilling by a 24-inch cast iron pipe. It wasn't on the vellum, it was on the backing sheet, so it was probably some bored drafter a hundred years ago just doodling while waiting for ink to dry. It totally broke my focus because I started laughing. It's wild to think someone was doing the same job a century ago and left this little joke. Has anyone else found weird hidden stuff in really old plans they were working from?
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jake_patel17d ago
That's so cool, did you save a scan of the rat sketch?
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owens.blair17d ago
Absolutely, I saved a high-res scan of it. It's the best part of that whole file. I found a tiny cartoon of a guy fishing in a storm drain on some 1950s subdivision plans once. He was drawn next to an inlet detail with a little speech bubble that said "where's the trout?". It's these little human moments that make digging through old drawings worth it.
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