Ingalls Building, The World's First Concrete Skyscraper

One block from Carew Tower stands a sixteen-story building that most people walk past without knowing they are looking at a world first: the Ingalls Building, completed in nineteen oh three, was the first reinforced concrete skyscraper ever built anywhere on earth.

Before the Ingalls Building rose, the tallest reinforced concrete structure in the world was six stories. Engineers and the general public were deeply skeptical that concrete could carry the loads required for a true skyscraper. Some predicted it would collapse under wind loads before construction was even finished. A Cincinnati newspaper reportedly stationed a reporter outside the building at night to be first on the scene when it fell.

It did not fall. The building's designer was the Cincinnati firm of Elzner and Anderson, and the structural engineer was Henry Hooper of the Ferro-Concrete Construction Company of Cincinnati. Hooper based his system on patents developed by Ernest Ransome, who had pioneered the use of twisted steel bars embedded in concrete since the eighteen eighties, a technique that locked the two materials together so they worked as a composite structure. At two hundred ten feet, the Ingalls Building proved that concrete could do what steel could do.

The building takes its name from Melville E. Ingalls, the railroad executive and primary financial backer of the project, who spent two years convincing city officials to issue a building permit at all. Ingalls was president of the Big Four Railroad, a man accustomed to making skeptics back down.

The Ingalls Building's success had consequences that rippled across American construction. Within a decade, reinforced concrete had become a standard structural material for tall buildings, reducing costs and opening new design possibilities. The American Society of Civil Engineers recognizes it as a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark. It is still in use today, more than one hundred twenty years after the skeptics said it would fall down.