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> “In 1905, [Gilbert] told The New York Times that after he wrestled with the problem for months, the solution came to him ‘like a flash’: He could support both
by gumby 3y ago
> “In 1905, [Gilbert] told The New York Times that after he wrestled with the problem for months, the solution came to him ‘like a flash’: He could support both the floors and the exterior walls on a concealed iron skeleton, like an iron bridge standing on end,” wrote Christopher Gray in the New York Times in 1996.
This is a bit bogus since the first buildings constructed this way were in Chicago and the revolutionary approach of hanging a building off an iron skeleton was very widely discussed, even in the popular press. The article even mentions this later on: "Though metal cage construction had been used to create Chicago’s Home Insurance Building in 1885, Bradford brought the technology to New York..."
The article calls Bradford Gilbert "Gilbert" in one place and "Bradford" elsewhere so I suppose expectations should be low.
- diogenes4 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Mistletoe 3y agoSounds like Gilbert would make a great Founder in our era.
- dgoldstein0 3y agoWhy should we assume he was familiar with the building techniques used in Chicago? Perhaps he just reinvented what already existed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gumby 3y agoYour general point makes sense: it’s true that 150 years ago news was more local. But thanks to the telegraph and train even local news contained wider affairs. And as I put in my comment, the Chicago building was famous — world famous in fact. It was a technological phenomenon like the telephone. And an architect of large buildings couldn’t have not heard about it any more than a programmer not have heard of an LLM today.