re: History of Skyscrapers/Structural Members?

If you really want to know the method they used, it had a whole lot to do with indeterminate structures, and they used a lot of iterative methods. Computer approximation wasn't a thing back then, so it was just sheet after sheet of hand and typed calculations.

There's a couple of strategies for doing it, off the top of my head I remember the force and displacement methods (Castigliono's theorem). Supposedly they were used to design the empire state building.

I do know that the Eiffel Tower was the first to use the Euler Bernoulli Bending theory for the first time, and it proved it's worth when it became the tallest building in the world. However IIRC that only worked for determinate beams. Indeterminate structural analysis came after, leading to the flatiron building in NYC, and steel and iron construction elsewhere.

From Wikipedia:

quote:

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Prevailing consensus is that Galileo Galileimade the first attempts at developing a theory of beams, but recent studies argue thatLeonardo da Vinci was the first to make the crucial observations. Da Vinci lacked Hooke's law and calculus to complete the theory, whereas Galileo was held back by an incorrect assumption he made.[3]

The Bernoulli beam is named after Jacob Bernoulli, who made the significant discoveries. Leonhard Euler and Daniel Bernoulli were the first to put together a useful theory circa 1750.[4] At the time, science and engineering were generally seen as very distinct fields, and there was considerable doubt that a mathematical product of academia could be trusted for practical safety applications. Bridges and buildings continued to be designed by precedent until the late 19th century, when theEiffel Tower and Ferris wheel demonstrated the validity of the theory on large scales.

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Eta- before that no one really had a firm mathematical way of justifying designs.