Construction Facts

There are more than 10 million bricks in the Empire State Building!

Joseph Strauss spent $130,000 on a safety net under the Golden Gate Bridge during construction - the most expensive safety device ever built for a bridge at the time. It saved 19 men who fell from the deck. Those survivors formed a club: the Halfway to Hell Club.

When the road authority drew up plans for a major highway in 2012, Iceland's elf communicators filed objections. The route was rerouted around an "elf church" rock formation in Galgahraun. Surveyors quit. Bulldozers broke. Construction companies hired professional elf mediators to negotiate. Over 50% of Icelanders refuse to deny hidden people exist. The elves have planning permission.

The Gateway Arch was built as two separate legs measured to meet precisely at the top. On October 28, 1965, the morning sun expanded the south leg. The last piece would not fit. Workers ran fire hoses to the top and soaked the steel until it shrank. Hydraulic jacks applied 450 tons of force, and the final section slid in.

The Washington Monument stood unfinished for over 20 years on a foundation too weak to carry the rest of it. In 1879, Army engineers dug out 70 percent of the earth under its base and poured concrete beneath it while the stump stood right above them. Then they built it to 555 feet. The color line where work restarted still shows today, about a third of the way up.

The White House interior is a 1950s building. Engineers found it near collapse in 1948. Margaret Truman's piano leg had just crashed through the floor. Workers gutted every floor down to the bare exterior walls. A new steel frame went up inside the hollow shell, foundations dug 20 feet deep. To protect the 1817 walls, they disassembled a bulldozer and rebuilt it inside.

Justo Gallego Martinez spent 60 years building a full-scale cathedral by himself in Mejorada del Campo, Spain. He had no architectural training, no blueprints, and no building permits. He used recycled junk - stacked oil drums for pillars, bicycle wheels as molds, broken glass for windows - on land he inherited. He died in November 2021, aged 96, with the cathedral still unfinished.

A construction foreman in South Bend, Indiana, was building a new wing for a children's hospital. Patients on the sixth floor looked down on his site. So he cut a giant Where's Waldo out of plywood, his daughter helped paint it, and he hid it among the scaffolding. Every time a child spotted Waldo, the foreman moved him somewhere new.

This ironworker on the Empire State Building was photographed by Lewis Hine, a man in his mid-50s whose pictures of kids in mills had already helped turn America against child labor. In 1930 Hine climbed the bare steel alongside the crews, and for the highest shots they swung him out in a basket nearly a quarter-mile above Fifth Avenue.

More than 420 severely injured veterans have been handed the keys to mortgage-free houses built around their injuries. It started when a Massachusetts construction supervisor saw a news story about a soldier who lost both legs in Iraq, found no group building homes for men like him, and started one in 2004. New houses are still being handed over.

The Bobcat is the loader on every job site. Louis and Cyril Keller, two welders in Rothsay, Minnesota, built it for a turkey farmer who needed his barn cleaned - from junkyard scrap, in six weeks. Neither brother went past 8th grade. The manure fork was bars off the old Rothsay jail. A farm-equipment maker, Melroe, saw it at the state fair and named it Bobcat. Louis's son Joe says it replaced the pitchfork and the wheelbarrow.