At the same time that William Aspdin was setting up the Portland cement plant outside Hamburg, another cement factory a little over 325 km (ca. 220 miles) to the east, in the Prussian city of Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), had already been in operation for over two years. Thanks to the efforts of chemist and entrepreneur Hermann Bleibtreu, Stettin would be home to some of the largest and most successful Portland cement companies in the world. By century's end, German Portland cement would be considered the finest made, and the nation's production of this building material would dwarf that of its birth country, Britain.
Hermann Bleibtreu was born in 1821 in the Rhineland village of Pützchen bei Bonn, now a suburb of Bonn. His father, Leopold, was a successful businessman who owned a lignite mine and factory. (Lignite is a soft form of coal—somewhere between peat and standard coal—that was widely used as an industrial fuel in Germany.) Leopold encouraged his son to study chemistry, a field that would obviously be useful in the coal industry. Unlike John Smeaton and Marc Brunel, Hermann Bleibtreu would find his father's designated career for him in keeping with his own interests. Hermann attended the universities of Bonn and Giessen, then matriculated at the Royal College of Chemistry in London. Although Bleibtreu made significant contributions to both the lignite and cement industries, it is his work in the latter for which he is most remembered. While in England, Bleibtreu was impressed by the growth of the cement industries there. After returning to Prussia, Bleibtreu began scouting for an area that had good sources of limestone and clay and was close to major transportation routes. Outside Stettin on the Oder River, he found clay rich in aluminosilicates. Just north of Stettin, the Oder empties into the Stettin Lagoon (Stettiner Haff), where the large island of Wollin holds huge deposits of chalk. The chalk could be sent by barge to Stettin, where it would be mixed with the local clay and kilned to make Portland cement. The finished product could then be shipped north to the Baltic Sea, and thence to the Scandinavian or Russian ports, or sent south to the city of Küstrin on the Oder, where it could be loaded on boxcars and transported by rail to nearby Berlin. In 1852, Bleibtreu, with the assistance of Consul Paul Gutike, formed a partnership with a local firm, Gruben und Fabrikanlagen, to build an experimental factory near Stettin to serve as a test bed for the project. The results were excellent. Bleibtreu and his partners quickly built a full-size factory in 1855 that produced twenty-five thousand barrels of Portland cement in its first year. Bleibtreu would go on to found several more cement plants throughout Prussia, and, in 1862, he entered his product at the International Industrial Exhibition in London, where it won first prize for its quality. The German cement companies, especially those in Stettin, would continue to win gold medals at industrial exhibitions and shows around the world.
The judges at the 1862 London Great Exhibition could not have realized that this award represented a symbolic moment in the history of Portland cement. The Germans, once their attention was concentrated on a particular industry, quickly dominated the field. Beginning with the work of Hermann Bleibtreu, the Germans invested tremendous time and research exploring the chemical interactions of the ingredients comprising Portland cement and steadily improved the mix. Unlike their British counterparts, virtually every major German cement company would have at least one chemist on its staff. Experiments were made with various mixtures, and tests were then conducted on their respective setting times and resulting compressive strengths. Detailed analysis was made of the various clays, especially their alumina and silicate content. Various other minerals, such as iron oxide and gypsum, were added to the cement mix in assorted quantities to see their effect on the quality and curing properties of the resulting concrete. Meanwhile, a torpid complacency had settled in among the directors of the various British cement companies, which slowed technical innovation to a leisurely crawl.
Not a few warned of the consequences of this complacency. A major industry leader, Gilbert R. Redgrave, wrote in 1895:
I regard the present time as, in many respects, a very critical period in the history of the cement trade. Our own country, the original seat of manufacture, has been distanced in certain directions in consequence of the superior scientific skill and energy of foreign rivals. The supremacy we have long enjoyed has undoubtedly been to some extent wrested from us by the products of Continental industry and enterprise, and in the absence of some united action and intelligent leading, our manufacturers are threatened with a competition which they are not adequately armed to encounter.1
The larger British cement firms did take concerted action, but of a different kind. Of more interest to them were the low prices offered by smaller British cement companies whose owners were desperate to remain in business. If the larger British cement producers had, like the Germans, concentrated on improving the quality of their product and greater manufacturing efficiency, the cheaper competition would have fallen by the wayside. Instead, a round of mergers began, and the larger firms that came out of this consolidation soon formed a commercial trust: the Associated Portland Cement Manufacturers (APCM) in 1900. Initially representing firms that comprised some 35 percent of all cement production in Britain, the APCM quickly grew, and its members would soon increase that proportion to 75 percent of total production in the United Kingdom.2
By this time, the APCM's share of the world market had dropped precipitously, and the once rich overseas markets, like the United States, had all but stopped buying British Portland cement. Besides Germany, Belgium and France had become major players as well. Germany's neighbors were paying closer attention to her success in the cement industry, and so they also began investing heavily in research and development. German technical journals were translated to French and avidly read.
The British consulates scattered throughout the world were required to file commercial reports on the imports and exports of their host countries. These reports were collected and published each year, and they chart the slow decline of the British exports of Portland cement in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. By 1905, one British consul in the United States wrote that British cement in that nation had all but disappeared, and, though much of it had been supplanted by domestic production, the Americans were still importing huge quantities of Portland cement from Belgium and Germany. This was true in most of the world. If one wanted the best Portland cement, the German product was preferred. If both price and quality were important, the Belgian cement, while not quite up to German standards, would suffice. The domestically produced cement could handle the rest.
That the British companies were slow to take notice of the situation could be attributed to the fact that the use of concrete in the building industry had increased substantially during the same period. More cement was being manufactured and used in Britain, and the country continued to ship the surplus to those of its colonies where protectionist trade policies were enforced, like India. Elsewhere, it was a different story. Many Commonwealth nations, such as Australia, began producing their own cement and supplementing the rest of their needs with product imported from abroad. When World War I broke out in 1914, Australia severed its commercial ties with Germany, from which it was importing almost 40 percent of its Portland cement. To the annoyance of the mother country, the Australians switched to importing cement from Denmark, and not from Britain. Officials of the British government, suspecting that the cement destined for Australia was actually being produced in Germany and simply rerouted through Denmark, launched an investigation. They discovered that the cement being shipped to the folks “Down Under” was indeed of Danish origin. Apparently, almost every industrialized country, including tiny Denmark, was manufacturing cement of a higher quality than the British could produce.
What saved the British cement industry from collapse were the two World Wars, which effectively removed their primary competitors from the world market. After 1945, a long period of peace settled over Western Europe, and competition in the cement industry gradually returned. Today, the vast majority of Britain's domestic cement production comes from plants owned by foreign-based companies, mostly French or German. The one remaining British-owned cement company of any consequence, Tarmac, now produces less of its product in the United Kingdom than its Mexican-owned rival, CEMEX.3 The story of the British cement industry is an instructive example of how industrial preeminence can be lost through complacency and an obsession with increasing profit margins at the expense of research and development.
PRODUCTION INNOVATIONS
Commercial declines, however, are rarely apparent at their onset, especially when a country enjoyed such a spectacular predominance as the British cement industry did in the mid-nineteenth century. And while innovations had slowed, they did not cease in the Britain.
British cement companies understood that simply increasing the size of their static bottle kilns, while producing better yields, was still inefficient, especially in terms of fuel expenditures and manpower. Rotary kilns seemed to offer a solution. They had been used in the alkali industry since the 1850s to separate salt from brine. The problem was that the alkali rotary kilns operated at far lower temperatures than those needed to vitrify the clay-limestone mix to produce cement. The first rotary kilns developed for the British cement industry were more robust, produced higher temperatures, and, while there were technical differences among them, they did share common traits. The kilns consisted of a long, thick iron tube raised at one end and resting on iron rollers. Intermeshed gears, usually spur or worm gears driven by a steam engine, slowly rotated the kiln.4 The raw material to be kilned was dumped into the raised end of the tube and slowly made its way to the other end of the kiln, where it dropped into a cooling pit before grinding. Heat was supplied by an oil or gas flame projecting from an iron pipe inserted into the middle of the opening at the lower end. Sometimes, coal dust was injected into the kiln, which was then ignited by the flame.
The first rotary kiln developed for the cement industry was patented in 1877 by Thomas Crampton, a noted British engineer now mostly remembered as the “father” of the submarine telegraph cable. Crampton's rotary kiln was too complicated and inefficient, and it never went beyond the experimental stage. A few years later, another Englishman, Frederick Ransome, introduced a slightly better rotary kiln. Ransome's kiln, patented in 1885, consisted of an iron cylinder 21 ft (ca. 6.4 m) long and 3.5 ft (ca. 1 m) in diameter.5 The problem with Ransome's patent was that it called for unmixed limestone and clay powder to be kilned. This was not a deliberate ruse to protect his patent: Ransome was ignorant of the need for thoroughly mixing the two minerals before kilning. In short, he did not comprehend at this late date—the 1880s—the importance of clinkering. Not surprisingly, Ransome encountered great problems in his attempts to make his kiln work properly. After a few years of effort, Ransome recognized his error, but he still could not get his kiln to achieve the operating efficiency needed to induce cement factories to adopt the technology. Further attempts by other British inventors to produce a practical cement rotary kiln over the next two decades also failed. Though much was learned by these failed attempts, the first commercially viable cement rotary kiln would be invented in another country.
Perhaps discouraged by the poor results obtained with rotary kilns in Britain, the Germans tried another approach. Their answer was the vertical shaft kiln. Small lumps of mixed clay/limestone were dumped in or near the top of the circular shaft, where the mixture was then heated from below. Various versions of the shaft kiln were used. Some had the flames projected from jets at the side of the shaft, while others mixed fuel with the lumps to accelerate the kilning process. Compartments or choke points within the shaft were used to control the amount of material kilned at one time. After kilning, the cement clinker would then be dropped to a cooling chamber at the shaft's base, or into a pit beneath it for later grinding. The shaft kiln reduced the amount of fuel and manpower needed to produce cement and helped give Germany another competitive edge in the industry. Shaft kilns are still occasionally used today for small-scale cement production and are sometimes seen at major construction sites.
STEEL REINFORCEMENT
The use of concrete as a monolithic building material, and its reinforcement through iron or steel, was a gradual and complex development. This may seem surprising to us, but some advances are obvious only in hindsight. Masonry construction had been used for thousands of years, and to the people of the nineteenth century, this building technique was both tried and proven. It was also venerated, for were not all the great buildings, from the pyramids to St. Paul's Cathedral, constructed in this manner? The longevity of this building technique, and the respect given it, imposed a kind of subjective blindness. By the eighth decade of the nineteenth century, the few buildings constructed of concrete were there for all to see, but most people perceived them as only novelties—if they took any notice of them at all. We suffer from the same cognitive disorder, for no doubt future generations will shake their heads in wonder about how we built things in our day.
Until very recently, the various histories of concrete identified Frenchman Jacques Monier as the inventor of reinforced concrete. A gardener and landscape artist, Monier tried building vases and planting tubs using concrete reinforced by iron wires.6 Monier patented his technique in 1867 and later sold the rights to his invention to two Germans, Wayss and Bauchinger. Wayss published a book in 1887 called Das System Monier that focused much attention on Monier's “discovery” and the possibilities offered by iron reinforcement.7 Actually, Wayss and several Austrian and German colleagues had greatly elaborated and improved upon Monier's primitive ideas concerning concrete reinforcement, but the name stuck: for the next three decades, the concept of reinforced concrete was often referred to in Europe and the United States as the Monier system or Monier construction.
However, Monier was hardly a pioneer in the field of reinforced concrete. Recent research has uncovered earlier precedents for the technology. In 1861, another Frenchman, François Coignet,8 published a treatise on concrete reinforced by iron bars, which he had patented six years earlier. Predating Coignet's paper by over a decade was the work of Jean-Louis Lambot, a gentleman farmer in southern France. In 1848, Lambot constructed a concrete rowboat reinforced with iron bars and mesh. He frequently used it to row across the pond on his estate just outside Miraval in Provence. The boat was 3.6 m (ca. 11.8 ft) long, with a beam of 1.35 m (ca. 4.4 ft).9 The hull was 30-40 mm (ca. 1.2-1.5 in) thick. The boat sprang a leak one day, and Lambot was forced to swim back to shore. Protected by anaerobic mud at the bottom of the pond, Lambot's reasonably well-preserved boat was recovered over a century later. Unless some earlier inventor comes to light, Lambot may rightly be called the “father of reinforced concrete construction.”
For the earliest example of reinforced concrete construction in the building industry, credit goes to an Englishman in Newcastle, William Boutland Wilkinson. Wilkinson was a plasterer who went on to found a firm that did thriving business by using Portland cement to cast concrete paving stones. Wilkinson was granted a patent in 1854 for “improvements in the construction of fire-proof dwellings, ware-houses, and other buildings.”10 The patent provides a clear description how to use a network of flat iron bands or disused iron cables to reinforce concrete walls or ceilings. He built an attractive cottage of reinforced concrete in 1865 to demonstrate the technology. Wilkinson's patent shows that he had given much thought to the processes involved, as well as to the structural stress issues. Still, Wilkinson could interest no one in reinforced concrete construction, and so he redirected his attention back to making cast paving stones, of which he sold many thousands.
While these events were transpiring in Europe, a number of American architects and engineers were also experimenting with iron-reinforced concrete. The large-scale use of concrete in the United States began decades earlier, shortly after the groundbreaking work of the British and French pioneers. The most notable example was the construction of the Erie Canal (1817-1825). The scale of such a construction project was beyond the ability of most Americans, so New York governor DeWitt Clinton sent American engineer and fellow New Yorker Canvass White to Britain to study the canals, aqueducts, and culverts of northern England and southern Scotland.11 White did his homework well and returned to the United States with hundreds of pages of notes and drawings. White recognized that the hydraulic properties of natural cement would be key to ensuring the canal's strength and durability, so he began searching New York State for outcrops of limestone adulterated with clay. He found them in abundance in Madison County. His advocacy of natural cement met initial resistance, but these doubts were swept away when White demonstrated the material's hardness and hydraulicity. White patented his cement in 1820 and would use it to build America's greatest engineering endeavor of the early nineteenth century.
The first experiments with iron reinforcement of concrete in the United States took place fifty years later. In 1871, only six years after Wilkinson built his cottage in England, William Ward built a large house for himself on Comly Avenue in Port Chester, New York. It still exists and is popularly known as “Ward's Castle.” Not only is Ward's Castle the earliest example of reinforced concrete construction in the United States, but it was also the largest reinforced concrete structure built up to that time in the world. Ward's home exerted a tremendous influence on American and European architects and engineers.
One American encouraged by Ward's work was Thaddeus Hyatt. Hyatt decided to conduct thorough tests of reinforced concrete's strength. Since the equipment needed for conducting such tests was not available in the United States, Hyatt traveled to London in 1877 to collaborate with David Kirkaldy, a pioneer in the development of industrial test machinery. Hyatt's work was critical in formalizing the relative strengths of reinforced concrete slabs, beams, and columns;12 Hyatt also discovered that the thermal expansion attributes of concrete and iron, as well as their elongation properties under a particular load, were virtually the same for both materials. This conclusively demonstrated the suitability of reinforced concrete for construction purposes. Another important contribution at determining the strength characteristics of reinforced concrete was the work done by François Hennebique, a Frenchman who had been conducting experiments for some years on the material, independent of Monier and the Germans. In 1879, Hennebique demonstrated the efficacy of using iron bands to overcome the weak tensile strength of concrete.
Despite all this work that proved the utility of reinforced concrete construction, Europeans and Americans remained skeptical of the building material. This kept the adoption of reinforced concrete for construction purposes restricted to those few adventurous individuals, like James Ward and François Hennebique, who had the resources to either build or perform major experiments with the material. Apparently, most contractors and architects did not yet trust reinforced concrete. A key person in changing those perceptions and in establishing respect and acceptance for reinforced concrete construction in the United States and the rest of the world was Ernest L. Ransome, a contractor in San Francisco, California.
ERNEST RANSOME
Ernest Ransome was born in 1852 in Ipswich, England. He was the son of Frederick Ransome, the man who had such trouble trying to get his cement rotary kiln to work properly. Frederick Ransome owned a company in Ipswich that manufactured agricultural implements. The firm enjoyed enough success to allow Frederick to conduct expensive experiments that, like the rotary kiln, would not bring financial disaster if they happened to fail. Ernest began his apprenticeship at his father's company in 1859 at the strikingly young age of seven years old. Besides the rotary kiln, another of Frederick's experiments resulted in the discovery of a particular cement made of powdered limestone mixed with a small quantity of silicate of soda that was then briefly submerged in a solution of calcium chloride. According to Ernest, the product was sold “in all parts of the world.” A curious comment then followed: “In America, the new process was introduced in 1870 by the Pacific Stone Company of San Francisco, of which company I was the superintendent for four years.”13 In this reminiscence of his early years, Ransome makes no mention of his birth date, for it would have highlighted how young he was when he traveled to the United States. Did he have his father's blessing for bringing this manufacturing process to the New World? Or was he a runaway? The trip from Ipswich to San Francisco would have taken some months, and fare for America's transcontinental railroad was steep. Did Ransome find work as a common seaman on a ship sailing to California? The reasons and circumstances of this precocious move are shrouded in mystery. While this abrupt relocation and other aspects of his subsequent career have certain parallels with William Aspdin's life, Ernest Ransome was incontestably the more honest, imaginative, and industrious of the two. Ransome's partners would not lose money; in fact, one in particular would do very well indeed. Ransome was grateful to those who assisted him in his career and was always ready to point out his indebtedness to them.
Ransome's decision to come to San Francisco, and not New York, seems odd at first. Perhaps it was a romantic impulse justified by practical considerations. San Francisco was growing fast. It doubled its population every few years, and the construction trades were doing quite well there. The Gold Rush had come and gone, but the 1870s saw greater fortunes being made just over the state line at the silver mines in Nevada. Although the silver was in Nevada, the riches flowed into San Francisco where most of the mining magnets, like James Flood, John McKay, James Fair, and George Hearst (father of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst), lived and invested most of their profits. San Francisco was also home to several railroad barons, as well as others who made fortunes by cornering prime industries (Claus Spreckels's sugar monopoly or Francis Marion Smith's domination of the borax market) or by making astute real estate investments (James Phelan, William Ralston), or through outlandish swindling (Henry Meiggs, Philip Arnold, and others). The unofficial capital city of the “Wild West” also had a unique and extraordinary allure. Oscar Wilde wrote of the city, “It is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.”14 Rudyard Kipling observed that “San Francisco is a mad city—inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of remarkable beauty.”15 Ransome's older American contemporary, Hinton Helper, wrote, “I have seen purer liquors, better segars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtesans here in San Francisco than in any other place I have ever visited; and it is my unbiased opinion that California can and does furnish the best bad things that are available in America.”16 That Ernest left England and abandoned a position at his father's successful firm suggests an adventurous spirit and a longing for independence. Thus, the reasons for his move to California are hardly strange: for what young man possessing such qualities in the late nineteenth century would not want to go to San Francisco?
As noted, Ransome quickly found a position at the Pacific Stone Company. The firm was located on Greenwich Street, between Gough and Octavia Streets (now in the Pacific Heights district), where it supplied cast concrete paving stones, vases, and architectural adornments. Ransome convinced them to switch to his father's calcium chloride and silicate soda-based cement. It did not require kilning and could be mixed onsite with ground limestone from the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains. The Ransome mix also enjoyed another advantage over Portland cement: the latter—like most heavy goods—was still being shipped around Cape Horn from the East Coast of the United States or from Britain. Thus, a barrel of Portland cement cost $8 (approximately $160 in today's dollars) in San Francisco, several times its price on the Eastern Seaboard.
In 1875, Ransome left the Pacific Stone Company to found his own firm bearing the eponymous name Ernest L. Ransome. It was located at 10 Bush Street, near Battery Street, just south of the waterfront. At that time, this was an industrial area, and Ransome's business was surrounded by furniture manufacturers, iron foundries, and textile factories. He did a little bit of everything he knew how to do. He made vases and statuary and sold sodium chloride and silicate of soda, the critical components used for making his cement. To maximize his exposure, he used the city directory to post as many separate listings as possible, each highlighting a particular product or service. Ransome's “business hours” were from noon to 2:00 p.m. It is likely that he spent most of the day working for customers or pounding the pavement, hustling up business and leaving his card with prospective clients. He would then probably return to the shop to meet with people or quickly wolf down his lunch. He had no residential listing, so he probably slept in a backroom of the premises. Ransome was probably too busy to do much research during the first few years of his business, but he seemed to have been doing well enough by the early 1880s to spare himself enough money and time to begin experimenting with concrete.
These were productive years for Ransome. While concrete construction was still rare in California, he noticed that when it was used, cracking usually occurred afterward. This was due to slight shrinkage of the concrete as it set. The previous solution to this phenomenon was to simply slop more concrete into and over the crack, hardly an elegant solution. He solved the problem by patenting a process by which expansion joints were incorporated into the design17—now an almost universal practice.
Around 1882, Ransome began switching from his father's cement to the Portland product. By this time, the cost of Portland cement had plummeted, as it was now being produced locally. Very locally: one of the state's largest producers, the California Portland Cement Company, was located on Beale Street, just a few blocks away from Ransome's business. However, this cement company had been in business several years before Ransome made the switch, so why did he wait so long? Although Ransome does not enlighten us, it is probably because his father's formula did not work well with metal reinforcement, since calcium chloride also accelerates iron corrosion. And this would not do, for one of Ernest Ransome's many contributions to the concrete industry was the invention of the modern reinforcement bar: the “rebar.”
Even by the 1880s, reinforced concrete buildings were exceptionally uncommon, and the few isolated examples used iron mesh or bands. The latter, often called “barrel bands,” were produced by the millions of feet each year for binding the countless wooden casks that were then used for shipping and storing everything from nails to wine. In short, iron barrel bands were used because they were cheap and readily available. Ransome felt that something better was needed, for the thin barrel bands bent easily under a load, and their flat surfaces were hardly ideal for securing concrete. He began doing experiments using two-inch-thick square rods, no doubt obtained from the Pacific Rolling Mill Company, a nearby ironworks that produced iron rods and cables.
During this time, most major cities in California were changing their wooden sidewalks over to more durable ones made of either mortared stone or concrete. In the beginning, most of these were being privately replaced by owners of the homes or businesses adjoining them. In 1883, word of Ran-reinforced paving panels made the rounds, and the prominent architect George W. Percy of the firm Percy and Hamilton approached Ransome to install a sidewalk using his panels in front of the Masonic Hall he was building in Stockton, a city 80 miles (ca. 128 km) east of San Francisco. It was during this commission that Ransome began twisting the iron bars to better grip the concrete on all sides and throughout its length. To twist the rod, he attached it in some manner to his steam-powered cement mixer (the details are sketchy), which he then turned on for a few moments. He discovered that this “cold twisting” of the bar also gave it additional tensile strength. In 1884, he patented the “Ransome system” of concrete construction using his reinforcement bar. His particular design would be widely used in reinforced concrete construction for the next thirty years, and it can be found in many ruins of old concrete buildings dating from this period.18
Ransome showed Percy the superiority of his system by applying heavy loads to a beam made of concrete using his reinforcement bars. Percy had long been intrigued by the potential of reinforced concrete construction, especially a method employed by a friend, Peter Jackson. Jackson, who had been inspired by Thaddeus Hyatt's work, had developed a reinforcement method that used parallel lengths of thin iron cables held in place by small tie beams.19 The latter were simply barrel bands with holes drilled in them for the cables to pass through. Percy felt that the tie beams were a possible weak point that could lead to shearing action under load stress. On the other hand, Ransome's system using thick rebar was much simpler and demonstrably better. Ransome convinced Percy that his reinforced concrete could be used not only to make sidewalks but also floors, walls, ceilings, and almost anything then being done in wood, masonry, or iron. Percy became a convert to reinforced concrete, though initially only in regard to floor and ceiling work. It was a major break for Ransome, and the two men would soon collaborate on several projects.
Still, it would be an uphill battle, as Ransome explained in a book published twenty-eight years later:
The introduction of the twisted iron was no easy matter, and when presented my new invention to the technical society of California, I was simply laughed down, the consensus of opinion being that I injured the iron. One gentleman kindly suggested that if I did not twist my iron so much I might not injure it so seriously…
But all this criticism led to exhaustive tests, and when the professors found that my samples stood up better than the plain bars, one even went so far as to suggest that I had doctored my samples. This led me to twist half of each test rod only, and the superior strength of the cold twisted iron was finally admitted, and in due time, when steel became common, even better results were had with cold twisted steel.20
The organization that Ransome referred to was the Technical Society of the Pacific Coast, of which George Percy was a founding member. Percy no doubt encouraged Ransome to ignore such criticisms and helped him organize testing procedures whose results would finally convince society members of the superiority of his reinforcement system over contending methods.
Ransome's first major project that fully utilized his reinforced concrete system was the “fireproof” warehouse for the Arctic Oil Company Works in San Francisco (1884). It was built to replace an older wood frame building. It was the first large commercial structure built of reinforced concrete and would help remove doubts about the viability of material in constructing major buildings. Two more buildings followed. One was the modest Alvord Lake Bridge (begun in 1886 and finished in 1887) in the city's Golden Gate Park. While it is usually cited as the first reinforced concrete bridge, it is actually an arched pedestrian tunnel under the park's main thoroughfare, Kezar Drive, now Dr. Martin Luther King Drive. (The first true reinforced concrete bridge was the one built in 1894 by the French concrete pioneer François Hennebique in Wiggen, Switzerland.) Nevertheless, the Alvord Lake Bridge is easily the world's oldest surviving reinforced concrete structure using modern rebar and has been designated a civil engineering landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Ransome received the commissions for these two projects before his collaboration with Percy. The Arctic Oil Works may have been of his own design, while the design of the Alvord Lake Bridge is attributed to John Hays McLaren, the horticulturist and “father” of Golden Gate Park.
Three projects that Ransome and Percy did collaborate on were the Bourn and Wise winery building in St. Helena (1888), the California Academy of Sciences display hall and offices in San Francisco (1889), and the Sweeney Observatory in Golden Gate Park (1891). All were designed by Percy, with Ransome performing the concrete construction work. For the first two, Percy hired Ransome to build only the reinforced concrete floors used in both buildings. The third structure was more ambitious in its use of reinforced concrete: the remarkable Sweeney Observatory built on Golden Gate Park's Strawberry Hill. The observatory was a beautiful structure made entirely of reinforced concrete, the first such designed by Percy, who had previously used it mostly for floor and ceiling work. The observatory, more a viewing platform than an astronomical observatory, was built with money donated by the eccentric San Francisco millionaire Thomas Sweeney. A winding gravel path led pedestrians or horse-drawn carriages though a magnificent castellated entrance to a one-hundred-by-seventy-five-foot courtyard arranged like a horseshoe. Flanking the portal were two towers holding spiral staircases leading to the viewing platform above. From the platform, much of the park could be surveyed, as well as the breaking waves of the Pacific Ocean to the west. Beneath the portal was a reflecting pool. The observatory's portal, mirrored by the reflecting pool below, was a common subject for artists and photographers. Although built of reinforced concrete, the observatory was cast to resemble a sandstone masonry structure. To enhance the similitude, the concrete was lightly tinged with red (probably by adding iron oxide to the mix). The observatory became so popular that a second story was added the following year that featured large glass windows to shield visitors from the occasional strong winds blowing off the Pacific. The Sweeney Observatory was featured on many postcards and in tour guides of the city.21
Another collaboration between the two men was the Girls' Dormitory (1891) at Stanford University near Palo Alto, California. Since the dormitory needed to be built quickly, Percy suggested that it be constructed of reinforced concrete. The suggestion was accepted. Ransome went to work, closely following his friend's blueprints. The large dormitory, Roble Hall, was completed in seven months. Three years later, the two men collaborated again on another project at the university: the Leland Stanford Junior Museum of Art (now the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts).
By the late 1880s, Ransome had become a very busy man, but he needed capital to finance a nationwide expansion of his construction company and also to cover the tooling and manufacturing costs to produce the cement mixer he had designed and recently patented. In 1889, he formed a partnership with Francis Marion Smith. Smith was a very wealthy man who had cornered the borax market a few years earlier. (Smith's brand, “Twenty-Mule Team Borax,” pitched by the actor Ronald Reagan when he hosted a 1950s television show, is still sold today.) It was a wise move on both men's part: Ransome would use Smith's seed money to make the new company the nation's leading concrete construction firm, as well as to produce his patented concrete mixers that would soon dominate the industry; while Smith, whose borax company would later be taken over by creditors when he became financially overextended, could still die a wealthy man, thanks in large part to the success of the Ransome and Smith Company.
One of Ransome and Smith's early efforts was, appropriately enough, building the Pacific Coast Borax Company's refinery in Alameda, California (1893). It was the second major commercial structure to be built mostly of reinforced concrete by Ransome. Smith assigned Ransome to build another borax refinery in Bayonne, New Jersey (1897). The latter building received much publicity in the industry press and was frequently pointed to as proof that reinforced concrete could tackle almost any construction task.
The use of reinforced concrete in building construction grew steadily over the next few years. Enumerating all of the many projects undertaken by Ransome and Smith goes beyond the scope of this book. However, one building incorporating Ransome's patented methods, mixers, and rebar would demonstrate more than any other structure in the world that a new era had dawned in the construction industry: the world's first reinforced concrete skyscraper.
THE INGALLS BUILDING
The first skyscraper was the Monadnock Building in Chicago, Illinois. It was built in 1891 by the architectural firm Burnham & Root and, upon its completion, could boast a number of “firsts”: the tallest brick masonry structure in the world, the tallest commercial building in existence at the time, and the first to use aluminum (for its staircases) on a large scale. It had 17 stories and rose 214 feet high. It dazzled everyone who saw it. The term skyscraper, the name for the tallest sail on clipper ships (also called a moonraker), would soon become the noun denoting any especially tall office building. The Monadnock ushered in an era of competition among architects and building companies for designing and constructing tall, taller, and tallest buildings that continues to this day.
The Monadnock Building was both pioneering and archaic: despite its impressive dimensions, it was also one of the last great office buildings to be built of brick masonry; the final flowering of a species doomed by the introduction of cheap steel. The improved efficiencies in steel production introduced by Andrew Carnegie, plus the recent discovery of the vast iron ore deposits at the Mesabi Range in Minnesota, brought the price of steel down to such a point that it now became economically practical to construct buildings using steel frames. And, because steel's strength was far greater than that of masonry—the latter's weight-bearing abilities were restricted to compressive loads—one could build even taller buildings than the Monadnock skyscraper.
Another important consequence of the steep drop in the price of steel was that stronger rebar could now be manufactured with the tougher alloy. Thus the strength of reinforced concrete increased substantially as well. Ransome quickly began making his rebar of steel, as did everyone else who had patented steel-reinforcement schemes (there were competing systems, but none survived for very long). The cost of cement was also going down, thanks to Keystone (later Atlas) Cement Company of Coplay, Pennsylvania, which was operating the first commercially-viable rotary kilns by the 1890s.
New converts to reinforced concrete construction were being made almost every day. Especially attractive were its economic benefits. Despite the drop in the price of steel, reinforced concrete construction was still less expensive than the steel-frame method. However, most people in the concrete industry recognized that one important hurdle remained: the construction of a major edifice like the Monadnock Building to demonstrate the strength and cost benefits of the material. At the time that the Monadnock Building had been constructed, the tallest reinforced concrete structures were only four stories tall, all of them constructed by Ransome. A skyscraper made of reinforced concrete would also demonstrate that claims made by representatives of the trade unions, such as the allegation that the material was not strong enough to support large loads and thus posed a public danger, would be proved both false and self-serving.
The opportunity for constructing a reinforced concrete skyscraper came in 1901, when railroad magnet Melville Ezra Ingalls decided to build an office building in Cincinnati, Ohio. He chose the architectural firm Anderson and Eisner to design the structure. W. P. Anderson took on the task and convinced Ingalls to construct the building using reinforced concrete instead of steel frame, the method then universally employed to put up such towering edifices. That was the easy part. The hard part was convincing the Cincinnati Planning Commission, whose members were no doubt being heavily lobbied by the trade unions to deny the building a permit. The process dragged on for months. In the meantime, Anderson and Ingalls went ahead with the project, securing the vast amount of Portland cement and rebar needed to build the skyscraper. Almost up to the day that construction work commenced on the building, the planning commission was still refusing to grant a permit. The reason they finally caved in at the last minute is not known, but it is likely because Ingalls's powerful political connections—and money—finally intervened to bring the matter to a satisfactory conclusion. Satisfactory to Ingalls, that is. The tens of thousands of men employed as bricklayers around the country must have realized that the concrete skyscraper represented a sea change in the building industry, and the only lucky ones among their ranks were those close to retirement age. The era of masonry construction of major buildings, which stretched back millennia, was slowly coming to an end.
Another beneficiary was the San Francisco firm of Ransome and Smith. Anderson had chosen the Ferro-Concrete Construction Company to serve as the contractors for the mammoth undertaking. The company had already licensed Ransome's patented reinforced concrete construction methods—including his rebar—and they also used Ransome cement mixers. It was the best kind of unpaid advertising imaginable—assuming the Ingalls Building didn't collapse, of course.
Reinforced concrete buildings were still rare. To put this in perspective, the amount of concrete cement used for the Ingalls Building represented one-half of 1 percent of all cement used in the United States. Considering that the thousands of homes and business buildings then being constructed were using concrete for their foundations, the amount leftover for monolithic concrete structures was meager indeed.
When the Ingalls Building was completed, it appeared no different from the steel-frame skyscrapers being constructed in most major cities of the United States. With sixteen stories it rose to 210 ft (ca. 54 m), just under the height of the Monadnock Building, and several stories fewer than the steel-frame skyscrapers being built. Nevertheless, it was more than twice the height of any reinforced concrete structure then in existence. (The previous record holder was the six-story Weaver Building in Swansea, Wales, built by François Hennebique in 1897.) The Ingalls Building measured 50 ft by 100 ft (ca. 14.25 m by 31.5 m), and, like most office buildings of its time, the first two stories were dedicated to business storefronts. Legend has it that so many people were certain it would fall, a local newspaper stationed a photographer near the building to capture its collapse on film. The story is probably apocryphal.
The Ingalls Building was featured in news stories around the globe and was, of course, given special attention in the construction and architectural journals. It is also one of the very few landmark reinforced concrete structures of the period that is still with us. Although Ernest Ransome did not build the skyscraper, his patented methods and equipment were used in its construction, and so vindicated his pioneering vision as nothing else could. Ransome continued designing and building reinforced concrete structures. The factory building he constructed for the United Shoe Company in Beverley, Massachusetts, in 1906, was considered the most advanced of its kind in the world and reportedly exerted a strong influence on the young German architect Walter Gropius. Ransome did more to win acceptance for reinforced concrete construction than any other single individual. When he died in 1917, tributes to his achievements poured in from around the world. Today, he is largely forgotten.
Although trade union guilds and unions continued to oppose reinforced concrete construction, their opposition largely vanished in the wake of the 1906 earthquake and fire in Northern California. Concrete advocates pointed to the resiliency of concrete structures to both the tremor and the inferno that arose in its wake.22
Ernest Ransome was also one of the last of the self-educated men who made significant contributions in the early days of reinforced concrete construction. Two of Ransome's contemporaries, also largely self-educated men, would play a role in concrete's story as well. One would use reinforced concrete with spectacular success; while the other probably should have stayed away from the building material and continue doing what he did best: creating electromechanical wonders.