William Le Baron Jenney

He went to Paris to learn how iron behaves. Phillips Academy took him in 1846 and the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard in 1853, and then he transferred to the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, where the training was engineering rather than taste — the newest iron construction methods, the functionalist doctrine of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, and the writings of Viollet-le-Duc, which he said surpassed anything anyone else had written. He graduated in 1856, a year behind a classmate named Gustave Eiffel, and came home to a war. From 1861 he served the Union Army as an engineer, laying out fortifications for Sherman and Grant, ending as a major and Engineer-in-Charge at the Nashville headquarters. He opened a Chicago office in 1867, the year he married.

The Home Insurance Building went up at LaSalle and Monroe between 1884 and 1885: ten stories, 138 feet, and a frame of metal columns and beams carrying loads that thick masonry walls had always carried. The metal weighed about a third of what the equivalent masonry would have, which meant the walls no longer had to hold the building up, and in 1891 two more floors were added without difficulty. He solved fireproofing next, combining masonry, iron and terra cotta in the Second Leiter Building of 1889 to 1891. The Manhattan and Ludington Buildings of 1891 are both National Historic Landmarks. He also laid out Chicago park land, commuted weekly to Ann Arbor in the late 1870s to start the architecture program at Michigan, and employed Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, William Holabird and Martin Roche.

The title he is remembered for is contested and always has been. The Chicago papers covering the Home Insurance Building in 1885 did not call it the first skyscraper — the label hardened much later, around the building's 1985 centennial. Other claimants get put forward regularly: the Equitable Life Building in New York of 1870, Philadelphia's six-story steel-framed Broad Street Station of 1881, the Montauk Block in Chicago in 1882, and, going back much further, an English flax mill of 1797 with an iron frame. There is also a pleasant story in which Jenney watches his wife set a heavy book on a birdcage and sees the whole principle at once. It reaches print as "a popular story" and nothing more, and his 1884 notebook of structural calculations survives to make it unnecessary.

He died in Los Angeles in June 1907 — his own article gives the date as the 14th in one place and the 15th in another — and his ashes were scattered over his wife's grave at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, near the Eternal Silence monument. The building came down in 1931 to clear ground for the Field Building, whose lobby got a plaque the next year calling Jenney's work the true father of the skyscraper. His papers went to the Art Institute of Chicago, including an undated sketch he labeled Key to the sky scraper. The men who trained in his office are far better known than he is, which is roughly what happens to engineers.

William Le Baron Jenney's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Principles and Practice of Architecture book
  Written in Chicago, and full of Viollet-le-Duc 1869
• Home Insurance Building building
  Ten stories and 138 feet on a metal frame — demolished in 1931 1885
• Second Leiter Building building
  His fireproofing system in masonry, iron and terra cotta 1891
• Manhattan Building building
  A National Historic Landmark, still standing in Chicago 1891
• Horticultural Building building
  Built for the World's Columbian Exposition 1893
• Illinois Memorial, Vicksburg building
  One of his last commissions, on ground he had helped besiege 1906

• 1846 aged ~14 Enters Phillips Academy in Andover
• 1856 aged ~24 Graduates from the Ecole Centrale Paris a year after Gustave Eiffel He had gone there for iron construction after starting at Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School.
• 1861 aged ~29 Joins the Union Army as an engineer He designed fortifications for Sherman and Grant and finished as Engineer-in-Charge at Nashville.
• May 8, 1867 aged 34 Marries Elizabeth Cobb and opens a Chicago practice the same year
• 1885 aged ~53 Finishes the Home Insurance Building on a metal frame Ten stories, 138 feet, and about a third the weight of masonry.
• 1891 aged ~59 Two floors added to the Home Insurance Building, and the Manhattan and Ludington go up
• 1893 aged ~61 Builds the Horticultural Building for the World's Columbian Exposition
• June 15, 1907 aged 74 Dies in Los Angeles His ashes were scattered over his wife's grave at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.
• 1931 aged ~99 The Home Insurance Building is demolished A 1932 plaque in the replacement's lobby called his work the true father of the skyscraper.

• Louis Sullivan 1856–1924
  Architect whose skyscraper designs and “form follows function” principle helped define modern architecture. employed
• Daniel Burnham 1846–1912
  Architect and planner whose City Beautiful vision shaped downtowns, civic centers, and urban planning. employed
• Ulysses S. Grant 1822–1885
  18th President and Union Army general whose leadership was decisive in winning the Civil War. built fortifications for
• William Tecumseh Sherman 1820–1891
  Union general whose campaigns through Georgia and the Carolinas helped destroy the Confederacy’s capacity to wage war. built fortifications for
• Frank Lloyd Wright 1867–1959
  Architect and engineer whose organic architecture, including Fallingwater, reshaped the built environment. inherited the frame
• John A. Roebling 1806–1869
  Developed wire-rope suspension bridge design and planned the Brooklyn Bridge. parallel in iron