INGENUITY AND LUXURY 



upon manual labor the introduction of any labor-saving 

 machine may have. 



The introduction of steel-frame construction menaced 

 the business of the carpenters. But steel-framed build- 

 ings are comparatively few. A more serious menace 

 seemed to be the introduction of concrete construction, 

 which was not confined to towering city skyscrapers, 

 but became popular in the construction of smaller 

 buildings of all kinds. Yet, curiously enough, this 

 very form of construction is dependent upon the work 

 of the carpenter, as we shall see from the description 

 of the construction of the Traymore Hotel, referred to 

 a moment ago. 



This building, nine stories high, covering a space 

 one hundred and twenty-two feet long by seventy-six 

 deep, was erected and completed exteriorly in exactly 

 three months and five days. The nine stories do not 

 include a massive dome, in which there are three addi- 

 tional stories. The foundation for the concrete was 

 made of piles driven down below the water level with 

 their caps bedded in concrete. The supporting pil- 

 lars of reinforced concrete varied in size from square 

 columns twenty-four inches, and octagonal ones with 

 minimum diameters of twenty-eight inches, at the 

 lower story, to columns ten inches in diameter in the 

 upper story. These were reinforced with eight f -inch 

 steel rods for each column, placed in the angles and in 

 the middles of the square columns, and in the middles 

 of the flat surfaces in the octagonal ones. So that the 

 actual surface of steel in the larger columns was only 

 a little over one one-hundredth of the concrete surface. 



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