Today’s news about the earthquate-caused cracks in the Washington Monument got me to wondering. When it was proposed to build a 555-foot high monument to Washington 150 years ago, was it pushing the engineering envelope? Was it considered an engineering marvel or was it considered routine? Were there nay-sayers who said it would never stand up?
It was the tallest building in the world when constructed. You bet it was a big engineering feat.
Originally, they wanted to cover it with a new wonder metal, but decided it would be too expensive. So it doesn’t have aluminum siding.
The Library of Congress’ Jefferson Building has aluminum ornamentation on its ceilings, though. At the time, it was comparable in price to silver! (More recently, there was a hawk living there. I love the LOC beyond all reason, I truly do.)
It’s an engineering marvel by 2011 standards.
It took 36 years to build, fwiw. You can see a difference in the color of the stone denoting the points at which construction was delayed.
No, but the capstone is aluminum.
And you miss the real point – at the time this was proposed, Aluminum was expensive to produce. The Hall-Heroult process of electrolysis was developed in 1886 and made cheap aluminum possible. Prior to that, aluminum was produced by the slower and much more expensive process of chemical reduction. Aluminum dinnerware was, at the time, a mark of opulence. The Monument was completed in 1884.
Delayed because of the Civil War. After the war they got the marble from a different quarry.
The years 1880 to 1890 were an important period in the history of tall buildings and not because skyscrapers were just starting to be built:
Cologne Cathedral became the tallest building in the world in 1880 when it was finished. Ulm Minister (technically not a Cathedral because it wasn’t the seat of a bishop) would have become the tallest building in the world when it was finished in 1890, but two other buildings passed its height in the meantime. (Note that the Wikipedia entry calls these two objects structures rather than buildings, so it doesn’t count them as the tallest buildings according to its definition.) The Washington Monument became the tallest building in the world in 1885 when it was finished, but it was passed in 1889 when the Eiffel Tower was finished. So, oddly, in this period, when people had already started building skyscrapers, someone decided that it would be good to build new structures that weren’t skyscrapers but would be the tallest buildings in the world.
Actually, the Civil War didn’t cause any of the delays. It was first delayed when they ran out of money, then when the Know Nothing party exerted political influence to stop construction, then because of poor construction, then because of structural concerns, then because of a renewed debate over the design. It stood one-third completed from 1854 to 1879. Once they started again in earnest, it took four years to finish.