Erik Larson in "The Devil in the White City" says that the Montauk building in Chicago was the first building to be called a "skyscraper." However, he says that no one has any idea how the name was coined. Now...I have found some of his other assertions wrong, such as when he says Chicago got the "windy city" name from the politicians (not the case!).

So, I was wondering if anyone has any idea how that name could have been coined for the first skyscraper. When I look up "Montauk" in onelook it just says: "A Native American people formerly inhabiting the eastern end of Long Island in New York." I can't see how it could come from that. Any ideas?

I've done a liitle surfing on the net and all of the sources I've seen say the Montauk building, also called the Hartford Fire Insurance Building, was indeed the nation's first high-rise building. I don't know if it was called a skyscraper at the time, or if that name was applied to it retroactively. It was ten stories high, but I don't know its height in feet.

I ran across another source (www.wordiq.com) that says the 10-story Home Insurance Building was built in 1881 and is considered by some to be the father of the skyscraper. It was also in Chicago and was 138 feet (42m) high. Elsewhere on the site it says the Home Insurance Building was built in 1884-85 .

On that last link , it says that skyscraper originally referred to a tall mast on a sailing ship. This is supported by the OED Online which gives as its first definition, "a triangular sky-sail," with the earliest citation from 1794. Their first citation of skyscraper referring to a building is from 1883. The citations for both the nautical and building meanings hyphenated the word (sky-scraper) until 1893.

I looked up sky in the OED Online and found an obsolete meaning of "cloud," dating back to about 1220. So I guess a sky-scraper was a sail that was so tall it "scraped the clouds."

Other meanings of skyscraper in the OED Online:

A high-standing horse. [A horse named Skyscraper, sired by Highflyer, won the Epsom Derby in 1789 ...]

A very tall man. (from an 1857 dictionary of slang)

colloq A rider on one of the high cycles formerly in use.

A tall hat or bonnet. Obs.

In Baseball, Cricket, etc., a ball propelled high in the air; a towering hit, a skyer.

An exaggerated or ‘tall’ story. nonce-use.

Tinman

This message has been edited. Last edited by: tinman,

Tinman, how comprehensive! Thanks! I am enjoying Larson's book a lot, but I have found a number of errors and don't really trust it to be historically correct. However, Larson says that in 1881 a Massachusetts investor, Peter Chardon Brooks III, commissioned Burnham and Root to build the tallest office building (the Montauk) yet constructed in Chicago. Perhaps it took 3-4 years to build?