October 21, 2026 · Indumor
On June 11, 1850, at a railway board meeting in Derby, Joseph Paxton — gardener and greenhouse builder — sketched on a sheet of pink blotting paper a building of iron and glass for London's Great Exhibition. It is not the only great idea to come out of a dull meeting, but it is one of the biggest. Eleven months later the building was open. What Paxton drew that day was not just a building: it was a way of building.
The history of industrial erection fits in one paragraph. In 1779, the Iron Bridge at Coalbrookdale was put together in cast iron with joints copied from carpentry. In 1850 and 1851, the Crystal Palace went up with repeated parts on a fixed module, made in series and assembled in months. Between 1887 and 1889, the Eiffel Tower took prefabrication to another level: 18,038 parts drawn to a tenth of a millimeter and preassembled in the shop. In Chicago, from 1885, the metal skeleton began to carry tall buildings, and rolled steel replaced iron. In 1930, the Empire State Building received its steel as fast as it was erected. And from the 1950s on, the high-strength bolt gradually displaced the rivet. The rest is detail, and it is worth it.
The Iron Bridge, opened in 1781 over the River Severn, spans about 30 meters and was the first large cast-iron structure of the industrial age. Its builders knew wood, and it shows: the joints are mortises and tenons, dovetails and wedges, like a piece of furniture.
The Crystal Palace, seventy years later, already thought like a factory. Every horizontal dimension was a multiple or a fraction of 24 feet; there were some 3,300 columns, some 2,224 main girders and about 300,000 identical panes of glass, 49 by 10 inches. Fox, Henderson & Co. built it. The contractors took the site on July 30, 1850, the first column went up on September 26, and the building opened on May 1, 1851. Every cast girder was proof-tested with a hydraulic press before erection, and in a single week 310 columns were set. The glass went in from wagons running in the roof's own gutters: the best glazier set 108 panes in one day.
The Eiffel Tower was begun on January 26, 1887 and finished on March 31, 1889: two years, two months and five days. It took 5,300 shop drawings by 50 engineers and draftsmen, and 18,038 parts of puddled iron — not steel —, which were preassembled into sections of about five meters at the Levallois-Perret works. Of its 2,500,000 rivets, only a third were driven on site. Each was set by a four-man team, by sheer elbow grease: one heated it, one held it, one formed the head and one struck with the sledgehammer. On site, between 150 and 300 workers. Eiffel's lesson still holds: the more gets solved in the shop, the less gets improvised up top.
In Chicago, the Home Insurance Building, completed in 1885 to a design by William Le Baron Jenney, had ten floors on a skeleton of cast-iron columns and wrought-iron beams, and during construction rolled Bessemer steel beams were substituted on the upper floors. It is often called the first skyscraper, though the title is disputed: it still had load-bearing masonry walls. What is not disputed is the direction. By about 1895, tall buildings were framed with rolled steel I-beams, joined with bolts or rivets.
The Empire State Building took that system to the limit. Construction began on March 17, 1930 and the building opened on May 1, 1931. Steel erection started in April 1930 and reached the roof in 25 weeks: some 57,480 short tons, all from Carnegie Steel. With no room to store anything on site, steel was ordered two floors at a time, two days ahead, and came from a yard in New Jersey by barge and truck. In July 1930, 22 floors of steel went up in 22 working days.
In 1947 the research council on riveted and bolted structural joints was formed in the United States; in 1949 the high-strength bolt specification was approved; and in January 1951 the council's first specification allowed rivets to be replaced by bolts one for one. The change was gradual, through the 1950s and 1960s, and by 1987 rivets were seldom used in new work. After the war, the pattern that is still the rule today took hold: welded in the shop, bolted in the field.
Look at a modern structure with these eyes and you will see them all at once: Paxton's module in the column grid, Eiffel's shop drawings in every marked piece, the Empire State's logistics in the truck that arrives with what gets erected that day, and the bolts that replaced the rivets at every connection. One piece of advice that comes out of this history: always ask for the erection drawing and the list of marked pieces. A structure that arrives unmarked gets assembled by eye, and not even Paxton did that.
To follow the thread to today, read welded vs bolted buildings, structural bolts and anchor rods. Contact us at Indumor.
Sources: Victoria and Albert Museum; Berlyn and Fowler, The Crystal Palace (1851); official Eiffel Tower website; Britannica; Chicago Architecture Center; Starrett Bros. & Eken construction notebook (1931), via the Skyscraper Museum; Research Council on Structural Connections.
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