Made In America - Bill Bryson [66]
Steel-frame construction and curtain walling made tall buildings possible, but they didn’t make them necessarily usable. For that, countless secondary innovations were needed, among them the revolving door, without which draughts would be all but uncontrollable, heightening fire risks and making effective heating and cooling an impossibility, and, above all, swift, safe passenger lifts.
The lift was not, as is commonly supposed and even sometimes stated, the invention of Elisha Graves Otis. Hoists and lifts had been around for years when Otis sprang to fame in the late 1850s. Otis never pretended to have invented the lift. His contribution was merely to come up with a simple, reliable device – a spring mechanism with gripper cogs – that made vertical passenger travel safe. A born showman, Otis travelled the world giving demonstrations of the safety of his lifts. Standing in a heavily weighted lift, he would have himself hoisted thirty feet or so above the ground, and would then call to an assistant to cut the rope. The audience would gasp, but instead of crashing to the floor, the lift would merely drop an inch or so and stay there. He sold the devices by the hundreds. (Even so, early lifts were by no means foolproof. In 1911 the New York Tribune reported that in the previous two years at least 2,600 people had been injured or killed in lift accidents.)
Skyscrapers may have transformed the appearance of the American city, but they have done surprisingly little for it linguistically. According to several sources, the Flatiron Building in New York was responsible for the expression twenty-three skiddoo, the idea being that the curious angular geometry of the building created unusual draughts that lifted the skirts of women passing on Twenty-third Street, to such an extent that men began hanging out there in the hopes of catching a glimpse of stockinged leg. And the police, in response, took to moving them on with the growled entreaty ‘Hey, you – twenty-three skiddoo!’ Unfortunately, there is not a shred of evidence to support the story. Skiddoo, meaning ‘scram’ or ‘scat’, is known to have been the invention of the linguistically prolific cartoonist T. A. ‘Tad’ Dorgan in the early years of this century, but how or why twenty-three became immutably associated with it is, like so much else, anybody’s guess.
7
Names
I
Soon after the Milwaukee Railroad began laying track across Washington state in the 1870s, a vice-president of the company was given the task of naming thirty-two new communities that were to be built along the line. Evidently not a man with poetry in his soul, he appears to have selected the names by wandering through his house and choosing whatever objects his eye happened to light on. He named the towns after everything from poets (Whittier) and plays (Othello) to common household foods (Ralston and Purina). One town he named Laconia ’after what I thought was Laconia in Switzerland located high up among the Alps, but in looking over the Swiss map this morning I am unable to find a place of that name there’.1 Laconia was, in fact, a region of classical Greece, as well as a town in New Hampshire. Never mind. Wherever it was from, Laconia at least had a kind of ring to it, and was certainly better than being named for groceries.
This is by way of making the point that