All over the world today, wherever big cities have grown up, there are very tall buildings that might be called skyscrapers. There is no special reason for calling a building a skyscraper. It’s simply a name we have given to very tall buildings.

In fact, the Bible tells of an attempt to put up a building so tall that it could never be covered by the waters of any flood. This, of course, was the Tower of Babel. During the Middle Ages, the people who lived in the cities of northern Europe began to build great cathedrals. Master builders learned how to fashion stones into pointed arches and flying buttresses to raise ceilings. Tall spires were added to give greater height and majesty to these churches.

For hundreds of years afterwards, these cathedrals stood as the tallest structures in the world. It was simply because no one had discovered materials and methods of construction which could be used to build taller buildings.

In the nineteenth century, as cities grew more crowded, the value of land there rose. In order to make room for more offices on a small plot of land, it was necessary to erect taller buildings. When the hydraulic elevator was invented, it became possible to take passengers and freight as high as 20 stories. But the problem was that to put up a stone building of such height, the walls on the ground floor would have to be more than 2 meters thick to hold the weight of the building. So another material was required to make skyscrapers possible.

About this time, three structures were put up that used iron or steel to support great weight with safety. They were the Crystal Palace in London, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. Architects began to experiment with buildings that had steel frames.

The first skyscraper in the United States was the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, designed in 1883.