The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, Illinois is identified as the first skyscraper, notable for using load-bearing structural steel as its main frame rather than traditional masonry. The hosts tie this to the rise of the American steel industry, crediting Andrew Carnegie with scaling up the Bessemer process (originally invented in Europe) to mass-produce steel in Pennsylvania, which fueled the tall-building construction boom of the Gilded Age.
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The hosts point to the famous photo of construction workers eating lunch atop a New York City skyscraper as an iconic image of the era.
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They note that while the US pioneered skyscraper construction, it no longer builds the world's tallest buildings, a shift now led by other countries.
198 words · auto-generated from the episode video
23:01for the home insurance company. It's the home insurance building in Chicago, Illinois. It utilized loadbearing structural steel as its mainframe. This is the first time that architects are using steel to create something this big. The steel industry really in America took off because of Andrew Carnegie. Um he took the Bessemer process which which was invented in Europe and he's like I'm just going to scale this up. I'm going to take over Pennsylvania and I'm going to scale this up. and it created it enabled um a lot of the construction that happened in the late 1800s during the guilded age and so on and so forth, right? Um very big
23:43deal. And now on the right hand side, that's a famous photo obviously of the workers having lunch at top the skyscrapers in New York City. America really took that downtown concept to a max. Now we've kind of settled down. We don't we don't build too many tall buildings. The rest of the world is building all of them. But we started it. >> Uh, nimiism strikes again. Physics 1887, the Michaelelsson morally experiment. This is the first American Nobel Prize in science.