Editor’s Note: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, The Century Magazine was an illustrated monthly publication that featured literary articles and excerpts of fiction by writers like Mark Twain and Henry James. In 1909, Frank W. Skinner authored “Foundations of Lofty Buildings,” a 5,000-word treatise on the then-nascent work to design and construct foundations for skyscrapers being erected mostly in New York City and Chicago in the U.S. As his bio at the end of the article describes, Skinner was a prominent engineer best known as editor of Engineering News from 1888 to 1914.
Frank W. Skinner (2025) studied this question.