Great Americans: The Man Who Birthed the Skyscraper

Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Joe Nocera wrote about Louis Armstrong, the father of that most American of art forms: jazz. Today, Daniel Akst pays tribute to Elisha Otis, the godfather of the American skyline. —The Editors

America was going places in the first half of the 19th century, and thanks to Elisha Otis, the booming young democracy got serious about going up.

Elisha Otis, born in 1811 in Vermont, was a farm boy more interested in agricultural equipment than in raising crops. At 19, he took his mechanical instincts off to Troy, New York, an important node in the second American revolution, this one industrial. There he set up factories for manufacturers, and everywhere saw opportunities for improving the world. He was, in the words of historian Jason Goodwin, “a stern and righteous churchman, and his Puritan God gave him a furious sense of imperfection. Almost everything he saw could be done better—faster, cheaper, more accurately—and he went at it with the energy of a man possessed.”

Otis embodied a country hell-bent to build. (Getty images)