Made In America - Bill Bryson [65]
Edison’s other great innovation was the setting up of a laboratory with the express purpose of making technological breakthroughs with commercial potential. Before long many leading corporations, notably AT&T, General Electric and DuPont, were doing the same. Practical science, elsewhere the preserve of academics, had become in America the work of capitalists.
As the nineteenth century progressed and small companies grew into mighty corporations, the new breed of magnates required increasingly grand and imposing headquarters. Fortunately, their need for office space coincided with the development of a radical type of building: the skyscraper. Before the 1880s, buildings of more than eight or nine storeys were impracticable. Such a structure, made of brick, would require so much support as to preclude openings for windows and doors on the lower floors. However, a number of small innovations and one large one suddenly made skyscrapers a practical proposition. The large innovation was curtain walling, a cladding of non-weight-bearing materials hung on a steel skeleton, which made tall buildings much easier to build.
Skyscraper had existed in English since 1794, but had been applied to any number of other things: a top hat, a high popup in early baseball, the loftiest sail on a merchant ship. It was first applied to a building in 1888 (though skyscraping building was used four years earlier), and not in New York, as one might expect, but in Chicago. Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century Chicago led the world in the engineering of large structures, and for one very good reason: it had burned down in 1871. The first skyscraper was the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, built in 1883-5, and soon followed by the Leiter Building (1889), the Reliance Building (1894), and the Carson, Pirie, Scott Building (1899). Soon skyscrapers were transforming cityscapes (an Americanism of 1850) all across the nation and so altering people’s way of looking at cities as to give new meaning to the word skyline, which originally was a synonym for horizon but took on its modern sense in 1896.
If Chicago was the birthplace of the skyscraper, New York soon became its spiritual home. The city’s first skyscraper, the twenty-two-storey New York World Building, opened in 1890 and soon Manhattan was gleaming with tall towers – the Pulitzer Building of 1892 (309 feet), the Flatiron Building (1903; 285 feet), Times Tower (1904; 362 feet), Singer Building (1908; 600 feet), Metropolitan Life Tower (1909; 700 feet), and finally the Woolworth Building, built in 1913 and soaring to 792 feet.44
With 58 floors and space for 14,000 workers, the Woolworth Building seemed unsurpassable – and for seventeen years it remained the world’s tallest building. Not until 1930 was the Woolworth Building displaced by the Chrysler Building, which with 77 storeys and a height of 1,048 feet was nearly half as big again. The Chrysler Building was only planned to be 925 feet tall, but at the same time a rival developer began work on a building at 40 Wall Street that was planned to be two feet higher. In order not to be beaten, the Chrysler Building’s architect,