Mini skyscraper

Big hype and the story of a small skyscraper





With more hype begin so many wonderful stories, and some of them - with a happy ending. One of these stories tells of the little skyscraper in the world, which stands in Texas Wichita Falls. Height is not particularly remarkable brick towers sticking out of a nondescript building saraepodobnogo - neither more nor less than 12 meters. Who and for what services has made this miracle in skyscrapers and where do the big hoax? Now you learn.

In 1912, in the district of Wichita found oil. Like flies on sugar, the smell of oil flew businessmen and industrialists from all over Texas and beyond. By 1918, in Wichita Falls was over 20 000 inhabitants, and local offices downright rattled on their business activity. Who will build a new church in the rapidly burgeoning profits campus, and offices give businesses suffering? Of course, this is it - the engineer JD MacMahon.



Engineer announced plans to build a large new skyscraper in Wichita Falls. McMahon gave the project: on the paper comes out, there will be built a building height of 480 feet - about 146 meters. Investors with burning eyes immediately sketched him 200 000 dollars (a lot of money in those days), and gladly approved the project: after all, even 200,000 for a skyscraper - very cheap.



Chuckling, the engineer started work at the right time, and it passed. What's the big hype? And that instead of 480 feet on the project indicated 480 inches! It is precisely 12 meters. Deceived investors, businessmen, clutching his pockets, ran to the court. The judge calmly stated: bachili eyes, scho kupuvali. So it was that fraud go unpunished, and cunning McMahon became a rich man.



But in the end the city of Wichita Falls was not even a skyscraper, but still quite a decent house. Newby-McMahon («New construction McMahon") survived a decade and has become a monument to greed, gullibility, and the Texas oil boom. Today the building is an antique shop and the studio of the artist, and the house itself is declared a historic landmark of Texas. Probably, they are proud to live in a small skyscraper in the world - even if it was built as a result of the big deception.



Why on the plaque says that the building was built in 1906? Perhaps this is another hoax