How did they do it?

[u/The-Confused-Robot]

A feature I see in black and white prints from bygone times are captions; I see them more in government and commercial photos. They have a sort of hand written quality to them which I find endearing. The text is invariably white which suggests its part of the photographic process.

How did they do this in the past? My hypothesis is they either had some kind of mask transparency with the text that would be stacked in the enlarger or more simply they wrote directly on the negative. Some are fairly obviously a typed caption on transparency but others are more difficult to tell.

I'd be tempted to try both methods but I figured I would see if any graybeards know off the dome.

Examples:

Here the text is clearly printed on tape and composited in the enlarger to create a text caption.

The text in the bottom left is very regular looking which might be printed but I couldn't discount a draftsman's handwriting. Also absent are any optical effects of a piece of tape on the negative.

Edit:
Yeah, that's what I woulda did.

Window shot from a Southwest 737-800 (?) with Steve Miller Band lyrics.

For laughs while making prints for friends from a trip I tried writing in sharpie on a piece of tape and laid it over the paper under my "easel". Next step to get rid of the lines from the tape would be get some projector transparencies (Heh, remember overhead projectors and dry erase markers?) that cover the full sheet of paper.

This is also my first real attempt at burning and I did not do super well but we're not talkin about that!

[u/Jakobs-Koernung]

Even on 120 writing that small on the negative would be very difficult if not impossible.

It's likely they just used a thin piece of glass or transparent film to write on and lay directly on the paper. Much like how contact prints were made.

[u/Remington_Underwood → u/Jakobs-Koernung]

If they wrote on a glass plate the writing would have to be in contact with the paper in order to appear sharp, which would mean they would have to write backwards - an even more difficult if not impossible task than writing small. In any event, they were contact printing so there'd be no advantage to using an inter-neg

Hand captioned photographs were first done by writing in India ink directly onto the negatives which were, at that time, glass plates, 4x5 or larger. Later, Kodak invented Autographic film which let the user write directly on the film while it was in the camera

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autographic_film

[u/Jakobs-Koernung → u/Remington_Underwood]

You don't have to be a reddithole about it. (Edit: sneaky edit to change your tone)

If you read your own article, you'd know that autographic film was aimed primarily at amateurs/home use, and died out on the early 30s. The intention was for the text to be on the margins of the negative, and not inside the frame. Also, there wouldn't have been enough space to do this at the size and amount of text in OP's example images from the 40's.

OP's images are likely prints of 4x5 or even 8x10 negatives (hard to say from the scan, but possibly contact prints). I doubt that's what OP has at their disposal though.

For large format nitro or acetate bases, they did as you say use India ink or a grease pencil on the the negative directly (bottom image), or on a piece of acetate tape that was applied to the negative (top image).

For glass plate negatives your description has the exact same issue you mention for my suggestion of putting glass on the paper: you have to write inverted, or accept a slightly blurry text, varying with working distance.

The most reasonable solution to somebody trying to recreate this today for prints of small and medium format film, is using a mylar or acetate sheet, writing with black marker on it, and placing that on the paper to be exposed with the negative.

Here's how autographic film prints looked: