…and here’s the video from last night’s C-SPAN broadcast from Big and Tall. Thanks to Russell Logan at C-SPAN, Teddi Baron at ISU’s News Service, and the amazing class who put up with camera crews and all kinds of setting up this past February…
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architecturefarm 
I very much enjoyed this, and have shared it with the CAF docent corps.
Question about steel construction. I know that rivets were succeeded (mostly) by welding and bolts, I think in that order, and I don’t know the timeline. Can you point me to a reference about that?
Thanks very much.
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A great question, and one that I’m hoping to get to the bottom of in the sequel…as I understand it, welding was more or less first, but it required testing welds in ways that made on-site welding difficult. Bolts seem to have surpassed rivets by the late 1950s or so when devices like torque wrenches enabled workers to tell just how tight they were making their bolts–critical when trying to create stiff connections. Welding is still difficult on site…any steel foreman will tell you that even today, you try to “weld in the shop, bolt in the field.”
Not authoritative by any means, and I’m hoping to spend some time figuring out exactly how this sequence went, but that’s how I understand it…
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