The First Skyscrapers (And How They
Became Possible)
by Mary Bellis
Updated August 10, 2016
The first skyscrapers -- tall commercial buildings with iron or steel frameworks -- came
about in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, and the Chicago Home Insurance
Building is generally considered the first modern skyscraper despite being just 10 stories
high.
Skyscrapers were made possible through a series of architectural and engineering
innovations.
HENRY BESSEMER
Henry Bessemer (1813-1898) of England, is well-known for inventing the first process to
mass-produce steel inexpensively.
An American, William Kelly, had held a patent for "a system of air blowing the carbon
out of pig iron," but bankruptcy forced Kelly to sell his patent to Bessemer, who had
been working on a similar process for making steel. In 1855, Bessemer patented his own
"decarbonization process, utilizing a blast of
air." This breakthrough opened the door for
builders to start making taller and taller
structures. Modern steel today is still made
using technology based on Bessemer's
process.
GEORGE FULLER
While “the Bessemer process” kept
Bessemer’s name well-known long after his
death, lesser known today is the man who
actually employed that process to innovate
the first skyscraper: George A. Fuller (18511900).
Fuller had been working on trying to solve the
problems of the "load bearing capacities" of
tall buildings. At the time, construction
techniques called for outside walls to carry the
load of a building’s weight.
Fuller, however, had a different idea.
Fuller realized that buildings could bear more weight—and therefore soar higher—if he
used Bessemer steel beams to give buildings a load-bearing skeleton on the inside of the
building. In 1889, Fuller erected the Tacoma Building, a successor to the Home
Insurance Building that became the first structure ever built where the outside walls did
not carry the weight of the building.
Using Bessemer steel beams, Fuller developed his technique for creating his steel cages
to supported all the weight in his subsequent skyscrapers.
The Flatiron Building was one of New York City's first skyscrapers, built in 1902 by
Fuller's building company. Daniel H. Burnham was the chief architect.
FIRST USE OF THE TERM "SKYSCRAPER"
The term "skyscraper,” as far as existing records show, was first used to refer to a tall
building during the 1880s in Chicago, shortly after the first 10 to 20 story buildings were
built in the United States. Combining several innovations—steel structures, elevators,
central heating, electrical plumbing pumps and the telephone— skyscrapers came to
dominate American skylines at the turn of the century. The world's tallest building when
it opened in 1913, architect Cass Gilbert's 793-foot Woolworth Buildingwas considered a
leading example of tall building design.
Today, the tallest skyscrapers in the world approach and even exceed heights of 2,000
feet. In 2013, construction began in Saudi Arabia on the Kingdom Tower, originally
intended to rise one mile into the sky, its scaled-down design will leave it at about one
kilometer high, with more than 200 floors.