1885

Washington Monument

In 1832, the first steps were being taken to build a monument for George Washington in Washington, DC. By 1835, the committee working on the monument could describe what they wanted: the monument would be “unparalleled in the world” and it “should blend stupendousness with elegance, and be of such magnitude and beauty as to be an object of pride to the American people.” The design they eventually settled on was a gigantic obelisk, scheduled to be the tallest human-made object in the world. Now all they had to do was engineer it and build it.

If you go to Egypt and look at the obelisks there, they are solid rock, and that means that the tallest is about 100 feet (30 meters). The Washington Monument at 555 feet (170 meters) is gargantuan by comparison. So it is hollow and made of stacked blocks. Its hollow design allowed for a crane inside to bring building materials up as the column grew. Today the hollow core contains steps and an elevator.

The first component built was the foundation—all 37,000 tons of it. It measures 126 x 126 feet and is 37 feet thick, made of concrete. The base of the monument measures 55 feet (17 meters) square, centered on the foundation, with walls that are 16 feet thick. At the top of the column, where the pyramidal shape starts, it is 34.5 feet (10 meters) square, with walls only 1.5 feet (45 cm) thick. There are 36,500 blocks in the monument, and at the base there are inner and outer walls, with the gap in between filled with rubble.

Although it seems like a fairly simple project—it is just a big stack of blocks essentially—it took quite a while to build the monument. The cornerstone was laid in 1848, and the dedication occurred in 1885, 37 years later. What this meant is that the Washington Monument was the tallest structure in the world for only four years. The Eiffel Tower eclipsed it in 1889.

SEE ALSO Concrete (1400 BCE), Bessemer Process (1855), Statue of Liberty (1886), Eiffel Tower (1889), Gateway Arch in St. Louis (1965).

Although a proposal for a monument to George Washington was put forth in 1799, the structure wasn’t completed until 1885.