St. Nicholas/Volume 40/Number 5/With Men Who Do Things
WITH MEN WHO DO THINGS
BY A. RUSSELL BOND
Author of “The Scientific American Boy” and “Handyman’s Workshop and Laboratory”
Chapter I
Two Chums Visit the Great City
I want you to chaperon me this summer in New York. We are to be all alone, and may see whatever we choose of the old town. Uncle Edward has put up a thousand dollars to pay expenses, We ‘ll have a dandy time. Will you come?
Oddly enough, Mother knew all about it. Uncle Edward had already written to Father and Mother, and had persuaded them to let me go. Their consent was obtained before I could ask it, and all I had to do was to write to Will a formal acceptance, and arrange for a meeting-place.
But how had Uncle Edward happened to put up a thousand dollars for this treat? Neither Will nor I knew until the summer was over, although I am sure that we would not have used the time differently had we known at the outset.
It seems that Uncle Edward had been boasting of Will’s fine marks at school, and declared his intention of sending my chum to college next fall. Dr. McGreggor, Uncle Edward's associate, was inclined to doubt Will’s fitness for engineering, and quite a discussion ensued. Finally, Uncle Edward decided to settle the argument by a test. Goethe, the great German philosopher, once said: “One sees at Rome what one takes there.” Uncle Edward was going to put Will in New York, let him spend the summer as he pleased, asking only that he keep a diary of what he saw and did. Then, by looking over the diary, Uncle Edward could tell what Will took to the city with him. In other words, if the diary was full of the engineering sights and wonders of the city, it would show conclusively that Will had brought with him a love for engineering. If no engineering tendencies appeared, Uncle Edward declared that he would not treat Will to a course in college. To be sure, I was in no way related to Uncle Edward, but as I had often met him, having been Will’s room-mate and particular school chum for several years, it was my good luck that I should be invited too.
When I received Will’s letter, I was so excited that I could n’t sleep that night; and if my readers are half as eager to plunge into our real experiences as I was, we can well afford to skip the tedious details of preparation that occupied nearly a week, and start our story with a bright Monday morning in June, when Will and I emerged from our boarding-house and sought out a sight-seeing bus. We thought that in that way we could get a general survey of the city, and then we could pick out the more interesting sights for especial investigation.
The ride on that bus was a very novel experience to me and to Will too; for, although he had seen the city on several occasions, his visits had always been very brief, and, really, he scarcely knew any more about the town than I.
“And those iron-workers,” recited the mega-phone man, “have no more fear of falling than a sparrow. They will run along a beam only six inches wide like squirrels on a telephone cable, and leap from one perch to another when a single misstep, the slightest misjudgment, a falter of the eye, would mean a fearful plunge of fifteen seconds with a velocity ten times as great as that of an express-train.”
Up on the very top of a post that projected twenty-five feet above the rest of the structure. I could see a man standing and waiting for a beam that was slowly swung toward him by a derrick. A sickening feeling seized me, my knees grew weak, and I shrank into a huddle of fright as he reached far out for the beam. My nerves were at such a tension that, when Will nudged me, I fairly shouted, “What ’s the matter?”
“That fellow is a fraud,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“He is simply trying to make a sensation, but he has mistaken his audience this time.”
“Who, the iron-worker?” I asked in bewilderment.
“No, no, the megaphone man. His mathematics are all wrong, and he thinks he can fool us. The velocity figures to only 179 feet per second, not counting the resistance of the air, or less than 125 miles an hour.”
“Well, one would find that fast enough if one should happen to take the journey,” said I.
“Certainly,” said Will, “it is bad enough as it stands without any exaggerations. But, shucks!” he said, when the ride was over, “I could n’t trust a thing that fellow had to say. We will have to go all over the ground ourselves and verify his statements. Let us go down to that building and find out something about it. It would make a good subject to start the diary.”
Photograph by Brown Brothers.
Waiting to receive a beam—“All in the day’s work.”
Chapter II
Five hundred fee above Broadway
“I wonder where the passenger elevator is,” said Will.
“I guess that is it,’ I replied, pointing to a ladder.
“It looks good enough for me,” he rejoined. “It leads upward, anyhow.”
It was a broad, double ladder, so arranged that one person could go up while another went down. We raced up the ladder side by side, and reached the floor above, neck and neck, all out of breath.
Photograph by Brown Brothers.
Throwing a red-hot bold into a riveter—five hundred feet above the pavement.
“Say, how many stories of this are there?” I asked.
“I counted thirty-nine from the street.”
“Well, excuse me. If we ’ve got to climb thirty-nine ladders like this, I resign right here. There must be an elevator somewhere.”
“There is one over there,” exclaimed Will, “and the car is just going up.”
We ran over and jumped aboard. A man hailed us on the way, but we did not stop to answer him; the iron gate of the elevator-shaft was slammed shut, and we were off before he could ask any more questions. The elevator was a large, wooden box big enough for about fifteen men to squeeze in, and with no door. As we were the last aboard, we had the pleasure of standing at the very edge of this open side, shrinking back as far as we could for fear of striking the door frames of the shaft as we sped past the successive landings. The men in the elevator looked at us curiously, but no one challenged us. At the thirtieth floor, the elevator stopped, and we all got out. The floors were laid, and there did not seem to be anything very exciting about our adventure so far. No walls were up as yet, but the outside girders were so deep all around the floor, that they formed a sort of low parapet which kept a fellow from feeling that he was going to fall off when he went to the edge of the building.
Projecting from the girder about ten feet apart were brackets from which was suspended a scaffold seven stories below, where men were at work on the walls. Below that was Broadway, filled with animated little specks, each tiny man no doubt fully conscious of his own importance. We could look down at one side upon the spire of a church, and I remember seeing a sparrow fly out of a chink in the steeple. I could gaze with contempt upon the bird from this loftier dwelling. How flat everything looked! Yet the horizon was on a level with my eyes. I could easily trace the Hudson River, from the Palisades to Governor’s Island, where it joined the East River, broadened out into the Upper Bay, squeezed through the Narrows, and then spread out into the Lower Bay. Off to the south the Atlantic Highlands showed clearly, and the Orange Mountains formed a ragged horizon to the west. The day was superb for long-distance seeing. There was not a cloud in the sky; not a trace of haze in the air.
“My, but I wish I had brought my camera,” shouted Will above the racket of the riveting hammers.
“Yes, and I wish I had brought a cap. This straw hat won't stay on!”
The wind was blowing a veritable gale. In the streets it was bad enough, but here there was no protection from it, and it swept by us at something like fifty miles an hour. I noticed that the men did not seem to have any trouble. Those who wore caps turned them, like aviators, front for back, with the peak pointed up, so that the wind could not lift them and tear them off their heads.
“Well, we had better proceed with our investigations, Will,” I said. “There is no use dreaming here all day.” We spied a stairway near the elevator, which we mounted. The thirty-first story looked so like the thirtieth that we did not linger, but went on up to the thirty-second. Here a gang of arch men were putting in the floor arches. I was astonished to find that the “arches” were perfectly flat and made of hollow tiles. A platform of planks was hung from the beams to support the tiles until they were all set in place. In the center of the arch two wedge-shaped tiles served as keys to keep the floor from caving in. It was impossible for any tile to be pushed through without spreading the steel floor beams apart.
There were no treads on the stairway leading to the next floor, and so we had to hunt for a ladder. To reach the ladder, we were obliged to pass an open shaft with no rail around it. It seemed to run all the way to the ground floor. We walked along a plank which lay at the foot of a high pile of lumber at the very brink of this deep well. I knew better than to look down, because I was too apt to get dizzy, but Will caught hold of a cable and leaned far over the edge. Suddenly the cable moved up, yanking Will almost off his feet. I caught and steadied him.
Photograph by Brown Brothers.
Over the abyss—bolting the steel cornice fifty stories above-ground.
“See here, Will,” I shouted, “what ’s the use of taking chances? Suppose that cable had started running down; nothing could have saved you.”
“How did I know the cable was alive?”
“That ’s just the point; because you don’t know, you can’t afford to be careless.”
We climbed on up to the thirty-sixth story, and found no flooring except some boards here and there. That ladder did not take us any farther, but we saw one off to the right at the outside of the building. Up this ladder Will climbed, and I followed him. The wind was blowing so hard that most of the time I had to hold my hat on. And there, far, far below us, was the street—500 feet sheer. The ladder was a double one, like the others, but was not secured; and, to make matters worse, half-way up there was a temporary platform which projected across our path, so that we had to reach far out on one side and worm our way past it. When we reached the thirty-seventh story, I determined that I had had enough. There was absolutely no flooring above me except a pile of planks and no flooring on the story above that; but the thirty-ninth apparently was provided with a complete plank flooring.
“No, sir, Will, not on a day like this. I ’m going no higher when I have to hold my hat on all the time.”
“Well, I’m not going to quit,” said Will, ‘‘as long as we are so near the top. Here, you look out for my hat, please,” he said, placing it on a board and wedging the brim under a steel beam. “I don’t need a hat. I ’m going way to the top.”
I watched Will climb up steadily, story after story, until he disappeared through the hatchway in the top floor.
I was up among the riveters and their pneumatic hammers were pounding away with a noise that deafened me. I watched a gang at work on my floor. There were four in the gang.
Photograph by Brown Brothers.
How City Hall Park looks to the steel construction man.
Suddenly something struck Will’s straw hat and bounded to the planks at my feet, spluttering fire. I was so startled that I jumped a yard; then I realized the hat was on fire. I threw it to the floor and stamped out the blaze, amid the guffaws of the gang of riveters overhead.
“Hello, kid!” they shouted. “Does your mother know you ’re out? Say, skeeters are pretty hot up here, eh? Don’t cry. Your big bruvver will be down in a minute.” Then, in a quick undertone: “Easy! here comes the boss!”
A young man, but powerfully built, ran lightly up the ladder from the floor below, caught sight of me, and stopped short.
“Well, for the land of Jehoshaphat! Where did you blow in from?”
“I am just taking a look at the building.”
“So I see, but how the dickens did you get here? Don’t you know you can't enter this building without a permit? Where was the watchman?”
“I did n’t see any.”
“I ‘ll have to look into this. Have the boys been having a little fun with you? What is the matter with your hat?”
“It is n't mine. It ’s Will’s hat.”
“Will? Who ’s Will?”
“My chum; he ’s gone on up to the top.”
“What! Two of you—eh? I'll have to go up and see about it. You wait just over there where the boys can’t play you any more tricks.”
I took his advice, and watched him run up to the top of the building. In view of my previous experience, it seemed advisable to look up, and avoid further trouble. The guying I had received rankled in me. I was only cautious, I said to myself; I was n’t really afraid, but it seemed useless to take further risks. I wondered whether, should any one’s life depend upon it, I could run around on the steel girders as recklessly as the iron-workers. I watched one fellow overhead. He picked up a board and was walking along a beam only a few inches wide. A gust of wind caught the board and swung him around. I marveled that he kept his balance, but he did n’t look alarmed; it was all in the day’s work.
Before long, Will and “the boss” darkened the hole in the top floor, and began to climb down, their coats flapping wildly in the howling gale.
“Say, Jim, it was great up there!” exclaimed Will, when he reached my story. “You certainly missed it. That setting gang is a nervy lot of men. They were setting a girder in place across the top of two columns. Two men were standing on the ends while it dangled from the derrick and swung around in the wind. They could n’t quite get it into position because the wind was blowing so hard, until a third fellow climbed to the top of the column, like a monkey, and stuck to it like a fly, holding on with his knees and one hand while he stretched out over Broadway, caught the hand of the other fellow on the girder, and pulled the end of the girder in place. Jiminy, you did take care of my hat—did n’t you? How did that happen?” continued Will, as he gazed at it ruefully. But he added: “Oh, well, who cares? It was worth it.”
I was relating my experiences to him when “the boss” came back from the inspection of some riveting and hailed us.
“Here, Will, and you—what ’s your name?”
“Jim,” I answered.
“You and Jim come on down with me. You can just take the back stairway down. I won't have you wandering all over. I have got to keep you at the rear of the building, or the superintendent might see you.”
“All right, Mr. Hotchkiss.” Will had already learned his name, also that he was the assistant superintendent on his afternoon tour of inspection. “He makes two trips from top to bottom, every day,” said Will, when there was a lull in the racket made by the pneumatic hammers.
At each story, Mr. Hotchkiss made us wait while he walked around to look at the character and progress of the work. At every opportunity Will quizzed him, and he was always good-natured enough to answer our questions explicitly.
I was astonished to learn that every steel piece in the building was numbered and had a fixed place on the plans. “Why, certainly,” said Mr. Hotchkiss, “this whole building is constructed on paper first. Every part is figured out in proportion to the load it has to carry, and then the parts are made at the factory. The holes are drilled for the rivets, and everything is prepared so that we can put the pieces together with as little work as possible. First the setting gang assembles the parts, fastening them with a few bolts, just enough to keep them in place; then the fitting gang goes over the work, reams out holes that do not quite match, and corrects any little misfits due to the warping of the metal. Finally, the riveting gang comes along and replaces the bolts with rivets.”
Mr. Hotchkiss hurried off to see the boss of the arch men, while we filled our heads full of questions to spring at him on his return.
“They ’ve got to hurry up with those floors,” said Mr. Hotchkiss, when he came back. ‘We are not allowed to let the steelwork get more than three stories ahead of the floors. We are way behind now, and there is liable to be trouble. The arch men can’t keep up to the iron-workers. It takes them only about five days to put up two stories of steelwork. The columns,” he explained, “are always two stories high. The entire steelwork for two stories at a time is ordered from the storage yard over at Bayonne, a couple of days before we need it. There a man sorts out the numbers we call for and ships the stuff on a
lighter to the Battery, after which it is drawn by horses to the building. Sometimes the load is pretty heavy. The heaviest we tried to handle was a girder weighing 61½ tons. It was eight feet high, nearly eight feet wide, and about twenty-five feet long. We did the hauling one.jpg)
Photograph by Brown Brothers.
Hand riveting where the pneumatic hammers cannot be used.
“Was n’t the girder smashed?” we queried.
“Oh, no, it was n’t hurt in the least. We took it apart—you know it is built up of plates and channels—and hauled it up in three separate sections.”
“Where are the engines that work the derricks?” asked Will.
“On the same story with the derricks at the start, but the derricks are moved up story after story, until they are six or eight stories above the engine before the engine is moved.”
“And the signals,” I put in, “how do you manage them?”
“At first we had a man stand at the edge of the building on the floor where the work was going on; he sent signals to the engineer by pulling a rope that rang a bell. Now that the building has reached such a height, we have the signals sent from the ground to the man on the floor where the derrick is set, by electricity. He in turn touches a button that communicates the signal to the engineer.”
To save time, Mr. Hotchkiss here told us to go down five flights and wait for him, as he had to attend to some work at the front of the building, and would find his way down by another stairway. When he came back, we were ready with more questions.
“That,” he said, referring to a huge black cylinder that ran up through the building, “is the smoke-stack.”
“It must be very heavy,” I ventured.
“Oh, no; not at all. It is made of light stuff. It looks heavy because it is so bulky. Each section is two stories high, and is supported by brackets on the floor beams so that there is no more weight on the bottom section than on the top. The sections are not riveted together, but are connected by slip joints. That gets rid of any trouble from expansion and contraction, you see.
“You must be going to have quite a powerful plant to need such a smoke-stack?”
“It will be quite a plant, 2400 horse-power. It takes a lot of power to run a building like this. We expect to have from 7000 to 9000 tenants. That makes a good-sized town, eh? and we are going to supply them with 81,000 lamps. Why. there will be enough wire in this building to reach from New York to Philadelphia.”
Photograph by Brown Brothers.
Finishing up the skeleton work of a tower.
A few stories farther down, we came across the men who were building the walls. I was astonished to find that what had looked from the street like marble was really terra-cotta coated on one side with a sort of enamel. It seemed like a fraud, but Mr. Hotchkiss explained that this material was not only cheaper, but in every way better, than real stone. It was much lighter, and was thoroughly waterproof; no water could soak into it to freeze and chip or flake off the surface in winter-time. He explained how it was that the walls were not started at the ground floor. Each story carried its own wall, supported on brackets, and so the walls could be begun anywhere. As the first four stories were to be of stone and the work of setting the stone was comparatively slow, there was no necessity for waiting for the stonework to be completed before going on with the terra-cotta. The walls were actually built of brick with the enameled terra-cotta attached to the brick by means of metal straps or bands. The only reason for using real stone on the lower stories, we were told, was be- cause the imitation could too easily be detected so near the street. Large blocks of stone were used, and these had to be set in place very care-fully. Some were left rough so that they could be carved. As with the steelwork, every piece bore a number which designated the particular spot it was to occupy; even the terra-cotta pieces were numbered. It impressed me greatly to find that every piece of the wall was accounted for, and my respect for the architect went up a hundredfold. It seemed almost like keeping count of the very hairs on one’s head.
When we got down to the ground floor, Mr. Hotchkiss saw us out to the sidewalk. He seemed to enjoy answering our questions, and we had by no means asked him all we wished to, yet.
“Are n’t you ever going to reach the height limit of these tall buildings? I should think they would soon be too heavy for their foundations.”
“Not at all; not at all,’ said Mr. Hotchkiss, looking around for an illustration. Then he fumbled in his pockets and pulled out a small bolt. Unscrewing the nut, he measured it, and found that it was a scant inch square.
“That ’s less than one square inch, eh?”
We nodded assent. Then he placed the nut on the ground and stood on it. “There, now I am subjecting the ground to a greater strain than is this whole building.”
We looked at him incredulously. “Yes, I weigh 210 pounds. Two hundred and ten pounds on one square inch makes how much per square foot? Reckon it up.”
Will had his note-book and pencil out in a jiffy, and started figuring. “Fifteen tons per square foot,” he announced presently.
“That ’s it. The building regulations of this city do not allow a weight of more than fifteen tons per square foot on the foundations. A foolish regulation, in my estimation, based on the idea that concrete would crush under a heavier load than that; but the kind of concrete we have nowadays, thoroughly reinforced with steel, will stand a far greater pressure. You can see for yourselves how ridiculously light the load is when you figure it down to square inches. Why, many a fat woman who picks her way across a muddy street on her French heels, exceeds the limit of the building code for pressure on the earth.”
“But I can’t believe,” I protested, “that a big building like this puts a strain of only 210 pounds on the ground. Do you mean to say that if you cut a sliver out of this wall from top to bottom and only an inch thick by one inch wide, it would not weigh more than 210 pounds?”
“Well, not exactly that. If your sliver were cut out of one of the steel columns, it would weigh six or seven times as much as that, and if it were cut out of the elevator-shaft, it would be as light as air. You must remember that very little of this building is solid all the way up. At the bottom of the columns there is a foot piece that spreads the weight over a large area of concrete. There are sixty-nine concrete piers under this building. It is a regular centipede, with concrete legs all over that stand on rock 120 feet below the sidewalk. Some of those legs are twenty feet in diameter. You will find that there are quite a few square inches in the foundation supports of this building. Altogether the finished structure is going to weigh something like 100,000 tons, with an allowance of 20,000 more for wind-pressure. That is n’t very much when you consider the size of the building. If you could throw the finished building into the ocean, it would float, provided the doors and windows did not leak, and, what is more, fully five sixths of the building would project out of water. Oh, we have n’t reached the height limit by any means. Somebody has figured out just how tall a building could be erected on a plot 200 feet square without violating the building code. He estimated that the building would be 150 stories high, reaching 2000 feet in the air; and it would weigh 516,500 tons. It would cost $60,000,000, and it would be required to stand a wind-pressure of 6000 tons. As a matter of fact, it would take something like 50,000 tons of wind-pressure to upset the structure. Of course, a building like this would not stand on concrete legs, but would have a single solid foundation pier 200 feet square, running down to bed-rock. If the steelwork could be erected directly on the rock without any concrete between, no doubt permission could be obtained to add a few more stories on top. Up-town they don’t have to bother with deep foundations as we do.”
“Did you really have to dig down 120 feet for the foundation for this building?” asked Will.
“Why, certainly we had to. You know how it was done, don’t you? What! never heard of caisson work? Well, there is a treat in store for you. Five blocks down Broadway, they are sinking some caissons now for a twenty-five-story building. You go down there and ask for Jim Squires. He is a personal friend of mine. Hand him this card, and he will show you all there is to show. I ’ll have to be going now. Glad to have met you, boys. So long.”
We shook hands with him, thanked him, and apologized for all the trouble we had given him.
“You ’re quite welcome,” he called, as he moved off. “And if you have any more questions to ask, drop in at the office any time around noon, and ask for Dick Hotchkiss.”