The Tale of the World’s Littlest Skyscraper
How a scam artist fooled investors with a simple trick.
Skyscrapers are long buildings that touch the skies. These monstrous products of beautiful engineering touch the clouds and shine with the rising sun. When you think about these buildings, they are very comparable to mountains.
However, there is one skyscraper in Wichita, Texas, that stands 40 feet (12 meters) tall. It is the Newby-McMahon building. It is popularly known as “the world’s littlest skyscraper.” This “skyscraper,” smaller than a lot of houses, was meant to be very tall.
Instead, a simple mistake changed its fate completely. In 1918, a petroleum reserve was discovered in Texas. This caused a massive oil boom. Wichita Falls had become a place for investors to pour money into the construction of buildings. They were confident that their investment would make them a fortune.
The boom didn’t last all that long. All the speculations about this place later proved to be wrong. Now, in all of this, some people managed to scam some investors with this building — a four-story long skyscraper.
Inches or Feet?
The blueprints of this building said that this would be 480" long, which is 480 inches. But it was meant to be 480' long, which is 480 feet. The investors didn’t notice that at all, and they approved only to find out later that it was not what they expected.
They filed a lawsuit against J. D. McMahon, the head of the construction firm that made this building. But they lost it as it was their own fault that they didn’t see what they were getting in the blueprints.
They were scammed, and there was nothing they could do about it. J. D. McMahon had very cleverly sneaked in an extra line to make this blueprint legally binding.
The investors had legally approved of J. D. McMahon’s proposal, and they technically got what they asked for. McMahon had collected $200,000 (around $3 million today) from these investors to make this building.
J. D. McMahon easily won this legal battle because the investors weren’t careful enough to notice the difference between inches and feet. He took the money and left Wichita.
