How did you do with this quiz? Did the phraseology of the past get in your way? What surprised you most about the almost futuristic high-rises of the past? Me, I liked the in-house ice water machines. Even fleabag motels have ice machines. It's a necessity of life.

Oh, how cool they thought they were in 1895. Not like us. We know how cool we are.

Here are the answers.

It is possible to put up one of these colossal twenty-story buildings within a twelvemonth. When we consider that many of the great cathedrals of Europe required several centuries for their erection, the dome of St Peter's at Rome being of itself a work of one hundred years, we the better appreciate the wonders of modern building. And what an army of men are employed, and how systematically they work! The lower stories are finished while the upper ones are in course of erection, and often there are tenants inside doing business while the work goes on.

The enormous amount of plumbing in one of these great buildings may be inferred from the statement that there are ten and a half miles of water-, gas-, waste-, and vent-pipes in the Manhattan Life Insurance Company's building, comer Broadway and New Streets, New York. Here are also laid thirty-five miles of electric wires. Among other curiosities of construction in such buildings are the great number of steam-pumps. In one case the contract called for twenty-three of these, though the building was designed for ordinary uses. Another novelty is an ice-water plant, which has been introduced with success, being supplied from a refrigerating apparatus in the sub-cellar. The object of this is to avoid the nuisance of having ice carried all through the building by tenants. Fountains are therefore supplied in each of the halls, connected with a special shaft run through the building to carry the cold-water pipes, and keep them separated from steam-pipes and radiators.

Now, you budding junior engineers. Go out and check your local buildings to see if they're up to 1895 code.

PS: Do you want to look at the book? It's called The Wonders of Modern Mechanism, by Charles Henry Cochrane, and its available on archive.org.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

01.06.15 Front Page

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