An architect name of Charles Burton proposed a 1,000 foot tall skyscraper. Nothing newsworthy there, except that the proposal was made in 1851. The idea was to take the iron and glass from the Crystal Palace Exhibition and rebuild it all into what would have been the worlds first skyscraper.
It’s certainly cool and all, but I have serious doubts that Victorian materials and construction technologies could have built a survivable skyscraper a thousand feet tall. It just seems like it would have been an accident waiting to happen. Winds would have caused it to sway; wrought iron already under incredible load doesn’t seem like a good choice here. And the exterior cladding of 1850’s glass seems like it would have come shattering down onto bystanders. And come 1940, the Luftwaffe would have had a hell of a fun time trying to bring it down.
Like the video says, the construction of this thing would have had a major impact on the future of very tall buildings. Had it worked, skyscrapers would have been much more popular far sooner; better structural steels likely would have been invented and commercialized sooner as a result. The world today might be populated with structures that make the Burj Kalifa look like a townhouse. But had it collapsed – perhaps even during construction – it probably would have set back the idea of skyscrapers, so that today cities would have spread out more sideways than upwards. Perhaps vast structures ten stories tall and a mile long would fill the cities instead of fifty and hundred-story towers crammed next to each other.
A single architectural decision could ahve changed the face of the modern world.