The Home Insurance Skyscraper

The first skyscraper with a skeleton of steel soars -- to nine stories.

Engineered by William LeBaron Jenney the Home Insurance Building in Chicago was the first tall building to be supported by a metal skeleton of vertical columns and horizontal beams and is considered the first skyscraper in the world. Jenney discovered that thin pieces of steel could support a tall building as well as thick stone walls could. The steel necessary to carry Jenney's 9-story building weighed only one-third as much as a 9-story building made of heavy masonry. Since the steel skeleton supported the weight of the entire building and the exterior wall was really just a skin to keep out the weather, the Home Insurance Building was the first tall building to have many windows. Jenney’s steel frame brought floor space and windows to the structure we now know as the modern skyscraper. During construction, people were so worried that Jenney’s building would fall down that the city halted construction to investigate the structure’s safety.