Excerpt from Engineering Wonders of the World, Vol. 2 The business districts of New York cover the southern end of Manhattan Island, where land fetches enormous prices. A corner plot at the junction of Broadway and Wall Street sold for 120 a square foot - the highest price ever paid for a building Site. The triangular site on which rises the famous flat-iron Build ing cost half a million pounds sterling. N o wonder, then, that in New York engineers and architects have turned their attention very seriously to the problem Of Securing more ample 0 cc accommodation by increasing the height of buildings. With brick and stone the limit had been reached at from twelve to fourteen stories, as the necessary thickness of the walls at the foundations diminished the floor space to a serious extent. Architects therefore took advantage of the fact that mild steel is at least two hundred times stronger than brickwork in compression, and infinitely stronger in tension. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.