by Bill Bryson
The Monadnock Building would be exceptional anywhere, but it is particularly so in Chicago, where the Earth is essentially a large sponge. Chicago is built on mud flats: anything heavy deposited on Chicago soil wants to sink—and, in the early days, buildings pretty generally did sink. Most architects allowed for a foot or so of settling in Chicago’s soils. Sidewalks were built with a severe slant, running upward from the curb to the building. The hope was that as the building settled, the sidewalk would come down with it into a position of perfect horizontality. In practice, it seldom did.
To ameliorate the sinking problem, nineteenth-century architects developed a technique of constructing a “raft” on which the building could stand, rather as a surfer stands on a surfboard. The raft under the Monadnock Building extends eleven feet beyond the building in every direction, but even with the raft, the building sank almost two feet after construction—something you really don’t want a sixteen-story building to do. It is a testimony to the skills of John Root that the building still stands. Many others weren’t so fortunate. A government office block called the Federal Building, constructed at a staggering cost of $5 million in 1880, took on such a swift and dangerous pitch that it didn’t last two decades. Many other smaller buildings had similarly abbreviated lives.
What architects needed was some kind of lighter and more flexible building material, and for a long time it seemed that that would be the one Joseph Paxton first brought to large-scale fame with the Crystal Palace: iron.
As a building material, iron was of two types: cast iron and wrought iron. Cast iron (so called because it is cast in molds) was great at compression—supporting its own weight—but not so good under tension and tended to snap like a pencil when stressed horizontally. So it made excellent pillars, but not beams. Wrought iron, in contrast, was strong enough for horizontal duty but was more complicated, time-consuming, and expensive to manufacture since it had to be repeatedly folded and stirred while it was still molten. As well as making it comparatively strong, the folding and stirring made it ductile—that is, capable of being pulled, rather like taffy, and bent into shapes, which is why decorative objects like gates are made of wrought iron. Together they were used in large-scale construction and engineering projects all over the world.
Curiously, the one place iron never caught on except incidentally was in housing. (Just once, as far as is known, did anyone of note try to use it extensively in the construction of a house—recall from Chapter VII that the bibulous, erratic architectural adventurer James Wyatt built a cast-iron “Bastille” for George III.) Elsewhere, however, iron went from strength to strength—until, that is, it was realized that strength was not actually its most dependable quality. The disturbing fact was that iron sometimes failed spectacularly. Cast iron in particular tended to splinter or fracture if it wasn’t cast perfectly, and imperfections could be impossible to detect. That became tragically manifest in the winter of 1860 at a textile mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts. There, one cold morning, nine hundred women, mostly Irish immigrants, were at work at their clattering machines when one of the cast-iron columns supporting the roof gave way. After a moment’s hesitation, the other columns in the row failed one by one, like buttons popping on a shirt. The terrified workers rushed for the exits, but before many could get out, the building collapsed with a roar that none who heard it would ever forget. As many as two hundred workers died, though remarkably no one bothered, then or afterward, to make a formal count. Hundreds more were injured. Many of those trapped inside were hideously incinerated as fires spread from broken lamps.
In the following decade iron’s standing suffered a further blow when a bridge over the Ashtabula River in Ohio collapsed as a passenger train crossed over it. Seventy-six people were killed. That accident was recalled with uncanny precision three years later, almost to the day, on the Tay Bridge in Scotland. As a train crossed it in bad weather, a section of the bridge gave way, hurling the carriages into the waters far below and killing almost an identical number of people as had died at Ashtabula. Those were the most notorious of the tragedies, but iron mishaps on a smaller scale were almost routine. Railway boilers made of cast iron sometimes exploded, and rails commonly worked loose or buckled under the strain of heavy loads or shifting weather, causing derailments. It was in fact iron’s shortcomings that in large part allowed the Erie Canal to remain successful as long as it did. Well into the railway age the canal continued to thrive, which is surprising on the face of it because it was frozen over and unusable for months each winter. Trains could run all year round and, as engines steadily improved, could theoretically carry more freight. In practice, however, iron rails just weren’t strong enough to support really heavy loads.
Something much stronger was needed, and that material was steel—which is just another kind of iron but with a different input of carbon. Steel was a superior material in every way, but it couldn’t be made in bulk because of the high volume of heat required. It was fine for things like swords and razors, but not for large-scale industrial products like beams and rails. In 1856, the problem was unexpectedly—and indeed improbably—solved by an English businessman who knew nothing at all of metallurgy but loved to tinker and experiment. His name was Henry Bessemer and he was already eminently successful from having invented a product known as bronze powder. This was used to apply a fake gilt finish to a wide range of materials. Victorians loved gilt finishes, so Bessemer’s powder made him rich and gave him the leisure to indulge his inventive instincts.
During the Crimean War, Bessemer decided he wanted to build heavy guns, but he could see that he needed a better material than cast or wrought iron, and so began experimenting with new methods of production. Having no real idea what he was doing, he blew air into molten pig iron to see what would happen. What should have happened, according to conventional predictions, was an almighty explosion, which is why no qualified person had tried such a foolhardy experiment before. The iron didn’t explode, however, but produced a flame of very high intensity, which burned out impurities and resulted in hard steel. Suddenly it was possible to make steel in bulk. Steel was the material the Industrial Revolution had been waiting for. Everything from railway lines to oceangoing ships to bridges could be built faster, stronger, and cheaper. Skyscrapers became possible, and so cityscapes were transformed. Railway engines became robust enough to pull mighty loads at speed across continents. Bessemer grew immensely rich and famous, and many towns in America (as many as thirteen, according to one source) named themselves Bessemer or Bessemer City in his honor.
Less than a decade after the Great Exhibition, iron as a structural material was finished—which makes it slightly odd that the most iconic structure of the entire century, about to rise over Paris, was made of that doomed material. I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time. And for that remarkable story, it is necessary to go back upstairs and into a new room.
* Weatherboards became known as clapboards in America; no one knows why.
* One man more than any other fixed our visual image of what Victorian London was like: the French illustrator Gustave Doré (1833–1883), whose illustration of London back streets appears on this page. Doré’s illustrative dominance was a little unexpected because he spoke barely a word of English and actually didn’t spend much time in Britain. Doré’s private life was slightly bizarre in that he conducted a number of torrid affairs with actresses—Sarah Bernhardt was his most celebrated conquest—but lived with his mother and for the whole of his life slept in a room adjoining hers. Doré viewed himself as a great artist, but the rest of the world did not, and he had to settle for being an extremely successful illustrator for books and magazines. He was very popular in England—for many years there was a Doré Gallery in Mayfair that dealt exclusively in his works—and is best remembered now for his dark drawings of London li
fe, particularly for the scenes of squalor along the back streets. It is interesting to reflect that a very large part of our visual impression of nineteenth-century London before photography is based on the drawings of an artist who worked from memory in a studio in Paris, and got much of it wrong. Blanchard Jerrold, the man who supplied the text for the drawings, was driven to despair by many of his inaccuracies. (If that name Jerrold seems vaguely familiar, he is the son of the Punch journalist who first called the Great Exhibition hall the “Crystal Palace.”)
• CHAPTER X •
THE PASSAGE
I
His full name was Alexandre Gustave Boenickhausen-Eiffel, and he was headed for a life of respectable obscurity in his uncle’s vinegar factory in Dijon when the factory failed and he took up engineering.
He was, to put it mildly, very good at it. He built bridges and viaducts across impossible defiles, railway concourses of stunning expansiveness, and other grand and challenging structures that continue to impress and inspire, including, in 1884, one of the trickiest of all, the internal supporting skeleton for the Statue of Liberty. Everybody thinks of the Statue of Liberty as the work of the sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi, and it is of course his design. But without ingenious interior engineering to hold it up, the Statue of Liberty is merely a hollow structure of beaten copper barely one-tenth of an inch thick. That’s about the thickness of a chocolate Easter bunny—but an Easter bunny 151 feet high, which must stand up to wind, snow, driving rain, and salt spray; the expansion and contraction of metal in sun and cold; and a thousand other rude, daily physical assaults.
None of these challenges had ever been faced by an engineer before, and Eiffel solved them in the neatest possible way: by creating a skeleton of trusses and springs on which the copper skin is worn like a suit of clothes. Although he wasn’t thinking of what this technique could do for more conventional buildings, it marked the invention of curtain-wall construction, the most important building technique of the twentieth century—the form of construction that made skyscrapers possible. (The builders of Chicago’s early skyscrapers also independently invented curtain-wall construction, but Eiffel got there first.) The ability of the metal skin to twist under pressure neatly anticipated the design of airplane wings long before anyone was seriously thinking about airplanes at all. So the Statue of Liberty is quite a piece of work, but because all that ingenuity is underneath Liberty’s gowns, almost no one appreciates it.
Eiffel was not a vain man, but in his next big project he made sure no one would fail to appreciate his role in its construction by creating something that was nothing but skeleton. The event that brought it into being was the Paris Exposition of 1889.
As is usual with these things, the organizers wanted an iconic centerpiece and invited proposals. A hundred or so were submitted, including a design for a nine-hundred-foot-high guillotine, to commemorate France’s unrivaled contribution to decapitation. For many that was scarcely more preposterous than Eiffel’s winning entry. Large numbers of Parisians could not see the point of placing an enormous functionless derrick in the middle of the city.
The Eiffel Tower wasn’t just the largest thing that anyone had ever proposed to build, it was the largest completely useless thing. It wasn’t a palace or burial chamber or place of worship. It didn’t even commemorate a fallen hero. Eiffel gamely insisted that his tower would have many practical applications—that it would make a terrific military lookout and that one could do useful aeronautical and meteorological experiments from its upper reaches—but eventually even he admitted that mostly he wished to build it simply for the slightly strange pleasure of making something really quite enormous.
Many people loathed it, especially artists and intellectuals. A group of notables that included Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola, Paul Verlaine, and Guy de Maupassant submitted a long, rather overexcited letter protesting at “the deflowering of Paris” and arguing that “when foreigners come to see our exhibition they will cry out in astonishment, ‘What! This is the atrocity which the French have created to give us an idea of their boasted taste!’ ” The Eiffel Tower, they continued, was “the grotesque, mercenary invention of a machine builder.” Eiffel accepted the insults with cheerful equanimity and merely pointed out that one of the outraged signatories of the petition, the architect Charles Garnier, was in fact a member of the commission that had approved the tower in the first place.
Eiffel’s Tower under construction, Paris, 1888 (photo credit 10.1)
In its finished state, the Eiffel Tower seems so singular and whole, so couldn’t-be-otherwise, that we have to remind ourselves that it is an immensely complex assemblage, a fretwork of eighteen thousand intricately fitted parts, which come together only because of an immense amount of the very cleverest thought. Consider just the first 180 feet of the structure, up to the first platform—already the height of a ten- or twelve-story building. Up to that height the legs lean steeply inward at an angle of 54 degrees. They would clearly fall over if they weren’t braced by the platform. The platform just as clearly couldn’t be up there without the four legs underneath to support it. The parts work flawlessly when brought together, but until they are brought together they cannot work at all. Eiffel’s first challenge, therefore, was to devise some way to brace four immensely tall and heavy legs, each straining to topple inward; then, at the right moment, be able to ease them into position so that all four came together at exactly the right points to support a large and very heavy platform. An incorrect alignment of as little as one-tenth of one degree would have put any leg out by a foot and a half—far more than could be corrected without taking everything down and starting all over again. Eiffel effected the delicate operation by anchoring each leg in a giant container of sand, like a foot in a large boot, which held them securely during construction. Then, when work on them was complete, the legs could be eased into position by letting sand out of the boxes in a carefully controlled manner. The system worked perfectly.
But that was only the start of things. Above the first platform came another eight hundred feet of iron framework made from fifteen thousand mostly large, unwieldy pieces, all of which had to be swung into place at increasingly challenging heights. Tolerances in some places were as little as one-tenth of a millimeter. Some observers were convinced that the tower couldn’t support its own weight. A professor of mathematics filled reams of paper with calculations and concluded that when the tower was two-thirds up, the legs would splay and the whole would collapse in a thunderous fury, crushing the neighborhood below. In fact, the Eiffel Tower is pretty light at just 9,500 tons—it is mostly air, after all—and needed foundations just seven feet deep to support its weight.
More time was spent designing the Eiffel Tower than building it. Erection took under two years and came in well under budget. Just 130 workers were needed on-site, and none died in its construction—a magnificent achievement for a project this large in that age. Until the erection of the Chrysler Building in New York in 1930, it would be the tallest structure in the world. Although by 1889 steel was displacing iron everywhere, Eiffel rejected it because he had always worked in iron and didn’t feel comfortable with steel. So there is a certain irony in the thought that the greatest edifice ever built of iron was also the last.
The Eiffel Tower was the most striking and imaginative large structure in the world in the nineteenth century, and perhaps the greatest structural achievement, too, but it wasn’t the most expensive building of its century or even of its year. At the very moment that the Eiffel Tower was rising in Paris, two thousand miles away, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina, an even more expensive structure was going up—a private residence on rather a grand scale. It would take more than twice as long to complete as the Eiffel Tower, employ four times as many workers, cost three times as much to build, and was intended to be lived in for just a few months a year by one man and his mother. Called Biltmore, it was (and remains) the largest private house ever built in North Am
erica. Nothing can say more about the shifting economics of the late nineteenth century than that the residents of the New World were now building houses greater than the greatest monuments of the Old.
America in 1889 was in the sumptuous midst of the period of hyper-self-indulgence known as the Gilded Age. There would never be another time to equal it. Between 1850 and 1900 every measure of wealth, productivity, and well-being skyrocketed in America. The country’s population in the period tripled, but its wealth increased by a factor of thirteen. Steel production went from 13,000 tons a year to 11.3 million. Exports of metal products of all kinds—guns, rails, pipes, boilers, machinery of every description—went from $6 million to $120 million. The number of millionaires, fewer than twenty in 1850, rose to forty thousand by century’s end.
Europeans viewed America’s industrial ambitions with amusement, then consternation, and finally alarm. In Britain, a national efficiency movement arose with the idea of recapturing the bulldog spirit that had formerly made Britain preeminent. Books with titles like The American Invaders and The “American Commercial Invasion” of Europe sold briskly. But actually what Europeans were seeing was only the beginning.
By the early twentieth century, America was producing more steel than Germany and Britain combined—a circumstance that would have seemed inconceivable half a century before. What particularly galled the Europeans was that nearly all the technological advances in steel production were made in Europe, but it was America that made the steel. In 1901, J. P. Morgan absorbed and amalgamated a host of smaller companies into the mighty U.S. Steel Corporation, the largest business enterprise the world had ever seen. With a value of $1.4 billion, it was worth more than all the land in the United States west of the Mississippi and twice the size of the federal government if measured by annual revenue.