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.

Before The Skyscraper

A few corrections are needed to Tom Peters’s article, in regard to the Watervliet Arsenal. It was assembled in two months in 1857, not 1849, on a prepared foundation at the U.S. Army (not Navy) Arsenal, at Watervliet, New York.

During high winds, the building had to be closed because of end-wall movement due to wind load. That is why Army engineers had an I-beam stiffener installed—to forestall the walls, falling due to the winds.

While not the oldest cast-iron building in the world, the Watervliet Arsenal is unique in that it was built as a storehouse without any interior finishing, so it affords the observer the opportunity to study its assembly technique and Fink truss system. Today, one-third of the building is occupied by the Arsenal Museum; the remaining area is used as originally intended, for storage.

William H. Bradford
Director/Curator
Watervliet Arsenal Museum
Watervliet, N. Y.

Land’s Lost Invention

I was surprised that Emma Cobb’s sketch history of the Polaroid Corporation (“Notes from the Field,” Fall 1987) failed to mention what was originally supposed to be Polaroid’s most important contribution to the welfare of mankind. In the late 1930s Edwin Land proposed that all automobiles be required to use his film to polarize the light from their headlamps at a forty- five-degree angle to the vertical. With all windshields similarly equipped to polarize the light reaching them from headlights, the direct glare from headlights would be cross-polarized and thus greatly reduced, whereas the light each driver would see from his or her own headlamps would not be so affected. The plan required all headlamps to be stronger to compensate for the losses due to polarization. The blackout of oncoming headlights was not perfect in practice, as the movement of cars changed the relative angles between opposing windshields and headlamps. At any rate, the scheme would have required legislation that was never enacted.

Eric A. Weiss
Springfield, Pa.

Nice Words

After reading six issues of your magazine, I have grown to admire it. Not only are the stories well written and entertaining, but the lessons of experience are extremely valuable. It is good that they are recorded. It is important that they be passed on, not just in general but to a certain audience.

American Heritage of Invention & Technology has created the right medium for doing this. I believe its substance and style correctly target the busy professional who is in a position to best apply the lessons of the past. The stories are short but not shallow. They are readable but not simplistic or lacking in science. And there is drama, especially when a determined individual, stubbornly holding to a vision or element of principle, triumphs over critics and advances the nation.

Keep up the good work.

Robert C. Marlay
Senior Scientist,
Office of Energy Research
U.S. Department of Energy
Washington, D. C.