The Jenney Myth: Fabricating the World’s First Skyscraper

What was the first skyscraper?

If you read Wikipedia or ask ChatGPT, both will tell you that it was the Home Insurance Building, completed in 1885 in Chicago and designed by the architect William Le Baron Jenney.

The only problem is that this is entirely wrong. Rather, Jenney’s designation as the “inventor of the skyscraper” was the result of a public relations campaign initiated by Jenney and his colleagues to make the world believe that Jenney created the skyscraper.

When Jenney’s client, the Home Insurance Company of New York, asked him to design a Chicago headquarters, he created a hybrid building that combined old and new materials and methods. In particular, Jenney embedded cast iron columns into the exterior load-bearing masonry walls to reduce their thickness. He connected these columns to the internal iron frame.¹ If one had stripped away the masonry façade, the building would have appeared like a skeletal frame, but it was never designed to act as a rigid wind-resisting skeleton independent of the walls.

Jenney was, however, the first architect to incorporate steel floor beams into the upper stories of a tall building. His original plans called for wrought iron beams, but the Carnegie mills asked him to substitute steel instead.² But steel and wrought iron had similar structural characteristics, so there was nothing revolutionary about this substitution. More importantly, the building could in no way be called a “steel skeleton,” as Jenney would later claim, because steel was only a tiny fraction of the total metalwork.

The Public Relations Campaign

When his building was completed, neither Jenney nor the broader architectural and engineering community took any particular note. Equally important, no one, including Jenney himself, tried to claim that the Home Insurance Building represented a revolution in structural design.³

However, in 1896, the discussion about the Home Insurance Building took a very different tone. At this point, Jenney and his colleagues asserted that Jenney invented the steel-framed skyscraper. By the mid-1890s, skyscrapers of twenty stories or more were rising around the country — including the twenty-one-story Masonic Temple Building (1893) in Chicago and the twenty-story Manhattan Life Insurance Building (1894) in New York — and people were curious to know who had “invented” them.

One such person was F. T. Gates, the president of the Bessemer Steamship Company, a ship manufacturer. In June of 1896, he wrote to the trade journal The Engineering Record (ER) to inquire who had discovered the idea of steel framing for tall buildings.

When Jenney read Gates’s letter, he went into high gear. The first thing he did was to write to Gates privately, telling him, “My claim is that in 1883 I invented and put into practical use in the Home Ins. Bldg. Chicago, what is now known as Skeleton Construction.”⁴ Then, in July 11 issue of Engineering Record, Jenney wrote a response, claiming that “The skeleton construction was a radical departure from anything that heretofore appeared and was exclusively my invention.”⁵

These statements — more than a decade after the completion of the Home Insurance Building — represent the first time that Jenney overtly claimed that he invented the skyscraper. And, equally important, they are untrue. The statement that skeleton construction was exclusively his invention overlooks the long history of iron farming, dating back at least a century before 1885. And there was nothing radical about his structure — it was a small evolutionary advance from the buildings that preceded it; and, for that matter, his building did not incorporate true “skeleton construction,” which emerged in the early 1890s.

Gates’s inquiry also motivated others to write in with their opinions. Several wrote in support of Jenney after he urged them to do so. On July 25, 1896, Daniel Burnham — Jenney’s friend and protégé, and the most famous Chicago architect of his generation — chimed in.⁶ Burnham wrote:

But Jenny’s building was not a “braced metal frame” because it had no wind bracing. Similarly, the statement that “No one anticipated him” is a gross exaggeration, as is the comment that “he deserved the entire credit.” Yet given how respected Burnham was at the time, his letter was viewed as a statement of fact, rather than the propaganda that it was.

Gates, however, was convinced by the Chicago architects and declared that his company would name their next vessel, “the ‘W. L. B. Jenney,’ after the eminent engineer and architect of Chicago, to whom we think the iron and steel trade is most indebted for this great advance in the construction of buildings.”⁷

After Gates’s declaration, the press then spread the word that Jenney had “invented the skyscraper.” For example, in 1898, the article titled, “Chicago’s Skyscrapers” published in The International: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine of Travel and Literature, concluded that that “More effective than anything else in settling the dispute [about the first skyscraper] was a letter from Mr. D. H. Burnham.”⁸ When Jenney died in 1907, he was celebrated in his obituaries, such as in The Pittsburgh Press, which wrote, “William Le Baron Jenney, inventor of the skyscraper… died in Los Angeles, Cal., yesterday.”⁹

But Why?

What was driving Jenney’s dogged attempt to rewrite history? Was it pure vanity? Or were other forces at work?

In the years between 1885 and 1896, other architects and cities were vying for the title of “first skyscraper,” and the Chicago community fought to claim what they believed was rightfully theirs. As a result, they began changing the historical account and offering misleading statements about the Home Insurance Building.

Leroy Buffington (1848-1931) was the most antagonistic of the lot. In 1874, he opened a practice in Minneapolis, where he flourished. In 1888, he won a U.S. patent for an iron-framed skeletal building design. In 1892, Buffington started suing for patent infringement. His first of several unsuccessful cases was against William H. Eustis, a real estate developer and the mayor of Minneapolis. Eustis’s answer to Buffington’s bill of complaint referred to Jenney’s 1885 article about the design of the Home Insurance Building in The Sanitary Engineer as proof that the patent had been anticipated and was, therefore, void (although the article said nothing about inventing a new building type).¹⁰

Buffington also wrote to Jenney (and likely many others), “I beg to direct your attention to my patent, No. 383,170, issued May 22, 1888 for ‘Iron Building Construction’, and to warn you and others to refrain from infringement of said patent or any of its claims.”¹¹ We can imagine that Jenney received quite a shock when he opened the envelope.

In late 1892, newspapers around the country published an article with the headline, “Buffington After Boodle,” which stated that Buffington “is about to begin suit against the owners of all the sky-scraping buildings in Chicago. He claims that the structural iron work has been put in a manner conflicting with the patent which he holds. He will claim damages to the extent of the 5 per cent of the cost of each building. This means that he will claim $4,500,000 from Chicago.”¹²

When Gates inquired to The Engineering Record, Jenney saw an opportunity to thwart Buffington’s claims, lest he too get sued. The letter-writing campaign was an attempt by the Chicago group to claim “prior art,” which is evidence that an invention was already known, thus invalidating a patent. Jenney’s phrasing, such as “was a radical departure,” and “was exclusively my invention,” and Burnham’s statement that Jenney “deserved the entire credit,” were efforts to demonstrate that Buffington’s patent was moot.

The New York Faction

Although Buffington’s actions might have put Jenney in serious financial jeopardy, several New Yorkers were trying to claim credit for the invention of the skyscraper, which Jenney and Burnham felt belonged to Chicago. One respected architect, George Post, believed he deserved the honor. His building, the New York Produce Exchange (1884), at the lower tip of Broadway, was arguably the first tall office building to contain at least one set of curtain walls—in this case, in the internal courtyard.¹³

Another New York claimant arrived on the scene in 1889. The architect Bradford Lee Gilbert framed the exterior walls of his eleven-story Tower Building with iron columns and included diagonal members for wind bracing. Like many buildings of the day, it was a hybrid, using old and new methods. Partly for his achievement with the structure, Gilbert won a medal at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 “for a new type of American architecture.” It’s telling that Jenney did not win an award for the Home Insurance Building.

Jenney and Burnham’s letter-writing efforts also aimed to squash the New Yorkers’ claims — even though their buildings were more pivotal for future tall building designs.

The Jenney Myth Must End

Jenney was an engineering genius to be sure, but his Home Insurance Building had none of the attributes that history has ascribed to it. It was not the first skyscraper, the first steel-framed structure, a radical break with the past, or a pivotal design.

Although it’s impossible to have a counterfactual history where Jenney never existed, we can say for sure that the skyscraper would have been “invented” all the same. For that matter, it’s likely that if Jenney had not been presented with such a propitious opportunity as the Engineering Record letter-writing campaign, his building would have been just a historical curiosity among architects and engineers with little notice among the public. It’s time the Jenney Myth was laid to rest.¹⁴