The History of the Submittal: The Job Had No Name for 70 Years

A job older than its name

In 1902, Engineering News ran an article on “making shop drawings.” It called a shop drawing “a very complete specification.” That is the submittal in everything but name: the contractor draws exactly what will be built, and the design team checks it.

The steps we run today were already the steps then — draw it, send it, approve it, return it. Only the vocabulary was different. The trade said “shop drawings,” “samples,” and “approval.”

Send it to the architect — in duplicate

By 1904, the review loop was standard, and it was written into contracts. Engineering News printed the plain instruction: shop drawings “must be furnished to the architect, in duplicate.”

Submit, check, return — the same cycle every submittal runs through now. The only difference is that “in duplicate” meant two paper copies carried by hand, not a shared link.

It cost real money, even then

In 1907, Engineering News published a whole article titled “Cost of Shop Drawings for Structural Iron and Steel.” A century before anyone measured the hours a team burns on submittals, the trade was already counting the cost.

The coordination problem is 95 years old

Here is the part that should feel familiar. In 1931, Engineering News-Record described the trouble with “approval of the shop drawings made by these remote and widely scattered agencies.”

That is the exact problem modern software exists to solve: getting the right approval from people who are spread out, out of sync, and hard to chase. It was the bottleneck in 1931. It was still the bottleneck in 2015.

The word “submittal” arrives late

Search the full run of Engineering News-Record and “shop drawings” turns up in more than 2,500 issues, running unbroken from 1902 to 1988. “Submittal,” used as the name for the artifact itself, barely appears before the mid-1970s.

So the thing came first, and the word came about seventy years later. When “submittal” finally caught on, it was a tidy label for a process the industry had been running — and complaining about — for generations.

The fight over who owns it

By 1988, Engineering News-Record was covering what it called “the especially controversial Chapter 21, Shop Drawings” — an industry fight over who is responsible for them. Designer or contractor? That question still shapes how submittals are reviewed and stamped today.

Why the history matters

The submittal has always been one job: get the right product approved by the right people, on time, without losing the paper trail. The tools changed — from duplicate ink copies handed to the architect, to email, to the cloud. The job never did.

That is the job we build for at Submittal.app. The same review loop from 1902, minus the parts that made people miserable for a hundred years.

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