It’s often the least impressive little things that have a profound impact on human history. From Housing Bubble? Give Thanks for the Balloon:
Back in 1833, in the little settlement of Fort Dearborn, Ill., not far from a muddy nest of log cabins called Chicago, a man named Augustine Deodat Taylor did a remarkable thing.He built a church.
It was St. Mary’s Catholic Church, a modest 24 by 36-foot wooden structure.
What was remarkable was the way Taylor built the church, the speed with which he built it, and the low cost — $400.
With only two helpers, he constructed the entire church in three months.
Had Taylor used the building methods prevailing at the time, the church would have taken most of a year and perhaps more to build and cost thousands of dollars. But instead of building it with heavy beams, carefully cut and put together with mortise-and-tenon joints by a small army of carpenters and laborers, Taylor employed two important and still emerging pieces of technology — machine-made nails and machine-formed lumber.
In fact, the star of Taylor’s effort was one of the most unsung yet important tools of progress in American history: the mill-formed white pine two-by-four.
Using these two-by-fours and some two-by-sixes, Taylor and his unskilled helpers built the four sides of the church by swiftly nailing together a frame. In the time it would have taken carpenters to carve the tenons on the ends of heavy beams to fit exactly into the carved mortises on other beams, Taylor and his helpers were joining the corners of the walls with nails and running joists and rafters across the top of the ‘box.’
Building nails, which had once been expensive because they were laboriously hand-forged by apprentice ‘nailors’ in blacksmith shops, were now available cheaply and in abundance — kegs of them — thanks to nail making machines that snipped them out of sheets or bars of iron.
The wood skeleton of vertical two-by-four ‘studs,’ spaced about 16 inches apart, and horizontal joists, all nailed together, would be familiar to anyone today. But back in 1833 it looked strange and flimsy. Carpenters hooted that the building would not last. They derisively called it a ‘balloon frame’ that would be blown away by the first strong wind.
The name, like the frame, stuck, becoming a term of art rather than derision.