JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
The fire-proof home was not much seen as a topic (so far as I can tell) in the early 20th century when Frank Lloyd Wright wrote about his proposal for one in the Ladies Home Journal in 1907. His design, outlined in "A Fireproof House for $5000") was an unusual subject then, and far more so since scholars say that this house of Wright's was never built as designed, appearing in a few iterations with stucco over wood, which of course is not fireproof. The article for a "Fire-Proof Library" appeared in September 1846 in the Journal of the Franklin Institute, written by a John Travers, who shared his plans for safely housing his wife's inherited library. The guy certainly was building a stout structure with massive walls, three tons of cast iron, cement, iron doors and window casements, stone, sheet lead, and 1.5"-thick wooden plank floors over cast iron trusses. How the wood figures to be "fire-proof" I do not know. But the subject was highly unusual, and decided to share the short article in full.
[By the way a very skilled mechanical engineer might make $5k/yr in 1910; a dentist, about $2.5k, and the average worker about $400 a year. So the Wright house for $5,000 intended not-for-the-wealthy was affordable for a few years' labor by the skilled professional and would have been out of reach for anyone else beneath that on the pay scale.]
Comments