Before The Skyscraper

Readers of Tom Peters’s most interesting article (…The Rise of the Skyscraper from the Ashes of Chicago,” Fall 1987) might be interested to know of the contribution in this area of a littleknown American educator named Cyrus Hamlin, who founded Robert College in Istanbul and was later president of Middlebury College. Hamlin, who went to Turkey in 1839 as a missionary, was a man who combined remarkable scientific and engineering skills with a great intellect, in the true Renaissance mold. He started a number of industries to help the unemployed in Turkey, and during the Crimean War he supplied the British army with bread and laundry services, and used the profits to build churches and schools.

One stone church he built in Bursa in the 1850s was immediately destroyed by a severe earthquake. He rebuilt it with an experimental steelgirder frame within the stone walls. In 1869 he undertook to erect a five-story college building on a hill overlooking the Bosporus. He used iron framework construction so that the building would withstand the earthquakes common to the region. It did, and it is still used today, by the University of the Bosporus. Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History , wrote, “The first Westerner to think of frankly turning the iron girder to account as a building material without bashfully drawing a ‘Gothic’ veil over his Volcanic vulgarity was not a professional architect but an imaginative amateur; and, though he was a citizen of the United States, the site on which he erected his historic structure overlooked the shores of the Bosphorus, not the banks of the Hudson. … It was only within the life-time of the writer of this Study, who was born in A.D. 1889 and was writing these lines in A.D. 1950, that the seed sown by Hamlin in Constantinople bore fruit in a West- ern World.” Coincidentally, Hamlin was asked by Cyrus Field, who was featured in James Chiles’s equally interesting article on the Atlantic cable, to head the commissary for the Union army during the American Civil War.

Hamlin declined.

Malcolm P. Stevens
Weatogue, Conn.