The Journey from being the right person to finding the right people

In this episode of The Engineering Passion Express, we take you on a journey from having all the right technical skills to do a project, to being the person who has to manage a combination of similarly talented people for a larger scale project. 

This story is told through the lens of Daniel Burnham, Architect and one of the first urban planners! Daniel didn't set out to build the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, but when it was offered to him in recognition of his skill, he accepted the challenge.

Join me and learn where Daniel Burnham and the fair struggled, how he overcame hurdles, many of which were personal and how the fair would impact the world in decades to follow!


Show Notes and Links

If after listening to the episode, you want to learn a bit more about the details of the fair, a great book is "The Devil in The White City" by EriK Larson. Here is a link to it - https://amzn.to/42rF8sc 

Note: Devil in the White City is two books in one. It's about the fair, but also about a serial killer lurking at the same time. They are separated by chapters, and I found the engineering and architecture chapters far more engaging, so if you don't like horror stories, you can skip the H.H. Holmes chapters.

The Engineering Passion Express is about growing knowledge and the passion for engineering. 

It is my hope, that this grows into a powerful community where people share knowledge, or their passions and find happiness in their pursuits of making things better by thinking like an engineer. 

The Engineering Passion Express is about growing knowledge and the passion for engineering. 

It is my hope, that this grows into a powerful community where people share knowledge, or their passions and find happiness in their pursuits of making things better by thinking like an engineer. 

Thanks for listening,
Brandon Donnelly
Please connect with me on linkedin @ linkedin.com/in/brandondonnelly

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:00

Six months before the eighteen ninety-three World's Fair, everything was falling apart. Deadlines were slipping, the ground was a muddy mess, and the world was watching, waiting for Chicago to fail. In the middle of the chaos stood Daniel Burnham, the architect hired to deliver a fair that could outshine Paris and the Eiffel Tower from four years before. But when the project geared towards disaster, Burnham did something unexpected. He took control, he made the tough calls, and he pushed the limits of what engineers thought was possible. This is the story of how Daniel Burnham fought to hold the fair together, and how the eighteen ninety three World's Fair challenged everything engineers believe about precision, collaboration, and about what it really takes to pull off the impossible.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02

Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that this portion of the Engineering Passion Express is running behind schedule. Not due to mechanical failure, but because Chicago is currently buried in political production. So please stay seated, folks. As we pull in, things are about to get interesting.

SPEAKER_03: 2:58

If you stepped off that train on the right day, things definitely were interesting. There was a group of men in a room somewhere, likely at the Union Club of Chicago, the Chicago Club, or the Palmer House, they were discussing how they could bring more than a billion dollars into the town. This group was made up of wealthy contributors, corporate sponsors, city officials, and bankers or financiers. And what they had set their eyes on for Chicago was becoming the host town of the eighteen ninety three World's Fair. The World's Fairs of the time stood for desire, pride, investment, and the future. It was your chance to compete for investment from companies, other cities and other countries. It would allow towns that hosted to attract the world's greatest talent, it would also market the culture of both the city and the country for tourism. The previous World's Fair held in eighteen eighty nine was a triumph. Gustave Eiffel and the Eiffel Tower elevated Paris and showed their engineering prowess by building the world's tallest tower on the world stage. But to build such an event, a venue that can handle people from all over the world coming in by the tens of thousands a day and the millions over the course of the entire event. Who do you even pick to lead up something like that? Well a shortlisted criteria might be someone respected in their field. Since there's a lot of buildings to be constructed and roadways to be managed, you might want somebody with architectural and construction experience. Since they're going to have to lead up something that's never been done before. You're going to want someone with a pioneering spirit. And since it's so huge in scope and magnitude, you're going to want someone who can navigate logistics, personalities, finances, and more. And when you take all of that into consideration, the list is not very long. And if you add one more constraint that you would like the person leading it up to be from the town that you were in and the city that you were in, then the list grows even shorter. It didn't take the leaders all that long to decide who should lead up this project. Daniel Burnham was their choice. He was respected in the city already. He was building the Masonic Temple for three and a half million dollars at the time, which was the most expensive project and one of the most expensive buildings in all of Chicago. And because he had built some of the leading skyscrapers in Chicago, he already knew many of the people leading up the bid to get the fare, because he worked with the same bankers, the same business people. But still, when somebody reaches out to you and says we would like you to lead this up, and it's of a scope, an order of magnitude larger than something you've ever dealt with, it's easy to resist and to pull back. The sheer magnitude of the task can cause the greatest self-doubt in us. And when you think the task lies outside your area of expertise, say as Daniel Burnham is an architect, and he's being asked to build an entire city to contain a world's fair, the task may not match the identity of the person. And when there's already that self-doubt, and you add in external resistance that Daniel Burnham faced, objections of other architects, most of whom were jealous and wanted to lead it up themselves, it becomes very difficult to simply say yes. Some of these other architects tried to justify their rejection by saying he's a businessman, not a designer, because Burnham's partner John Root would take the lead on the design portions while Burnham handled the manufacturing, the logistics, the finances, and bringing work into the office. They also felt Chicago wasn't a sophisticated town like Boston or New York, so it should be led by an architect from those areas. After all, we don't want to disgrace America by showing something less sophisticated than what we're actually capable of. And others thought having a centralized planner making decisions in an authoritative hierarchy would be absolutely terrible and stifle creativity. But there's always other forces acting on us that push us in the opposite direction. To learn, to grow, to accept tasks that are beyond the scope of anything that we've ever done. Daniel Burnham had this in his partner, John Root. John was a creative designer who pioneered raft foundations and other architectural features necessary to build the modern skyscrapers of the time. And he wanted to do great work, and he knew his partner, Daniel Burnham accepting, would allow him to also be extremely intertwined in the decision making process of the fair. There's also a larger force at play, and that's often how we feel about ourselves. Daniel Burnham was perceived as wealthy, respectable, and he had comfortable downtown architectural offices. He was held in high esteem by other industry leaders and civic leaders in the Chicago area, but most of them were not like him. In fact, his true identity was that he was from a middle class family, and he was ambitious, restless really, with a chip on his shoulder from past failure. He tried to get into Harvard and Yale and he failed. He tried to become a gold prospector and he failed. He tried to become a politician in Nevada and he failed. And nothing creates a chip on the shoulder quite like failure. At least not in those who refuse to believe that their identity is one of failure. To start down that path, Burnham started as a draftsman in 1868 at twenty two years old. He was working at Carter, Drake and Wright, where he met John Wellbourne Root, and he developed his skills as a master of organization and execution. Skills that others would notice. And those others that were taking notice were very important people in the city of Chicago. There was Lyman J. Gage, a civic leader, who always encouraged people to think bigger for the town. There was Charles Schwab, a steel magnate, who started out as an engineer at Carnegie Steel and worked his way to the top of the industry. There was George Pullman, famous for his rail cars, who was also a master of logistics and finance. And there was Marshall Field, the retail king. And all of these men had tremendous success in access to the kind of financing that the largest projects in the world require. But when a group of such powerful men who have had such great successes approaches you and says, We need you to lead up an amazingly large project of huge ambition for the city of Chicago. It may unsettle you being in the shadow of such a well-esteemed group of successful people. At the same time, having such an esteemed group of people put their faith in you and say that we think you are the right person for this job in itself is an amazing honor. Like anyone with a shred of humility. to say, I need to think about this. Or maybe I'm not the right person for the job. But when you think about it, the plan for such a job is really pretty simple at a high level. Build a talented team of people, coordinate a cohesive and interesting place for the fair to be held. And then the hardest part, elevate the city of Chicago. For a talented team of people, if you've been in an industry long enough, you've definitely met at least a few others whose talents you recognize. Coordinating is something anyone who's been in a managerial position or had to work on projects of a large scope with lots of different knowledge has had to do in the past, so that's nothing new. Elevating the city of Chicago is really about setting a high standard. If you already do great work, which is the reason you're being asked in the first place, setting that standard should not be the difficult part. So when you think about it, it makes sense why this group pushed for Daniel Burnham. They know that he knows other architects that are also talented. They know he can create an interesting place because he's built beautiful buildings. And while elevating the city of Chicago is not something that happens on the daily, that part was always going to be an experiment.

SPEAKER_01: 14:02

If you look out your right window, you can see a man in contemplation. He's wearing a very expensive stuff. And I can't tell if he just lost a fortune. We all have our opportunities, and we all take our loans. If he's lost something important, he'll have to figure out how to rebuild just like everybody else.

SPEAKER_03: 15:14

Daniel Burnham did struggle with this. It wasn't something he immediately thought he'd be successful at. And in fact, he had failure in his life in the past. He failed to enter Harvard, he failed to enter Yale, he failed to become a gold prospector, and he failed to be a Nevada politician. Architecture was something he had been successful at. But if you take on a project that's too large and you fail, it feels like that's going to haunt you forever, and that that's going to be attached to your legacy. And when you already have a few other items in your life where you've failed, you may be scared to take on a bigger endeavor. The problem is that humility, that drive, that ambition to not fail, is exactly what's needed in nearly every large project. You don't want somebody who's gonna take it too laxadaisical and not put in every ounce of effort that's required to make something spectacular. And it's that chip on Daniel Burnham's shoulder from his past failures that made him an even more attractive candidate to lead up this group of men to these leaders of Chicago. As a man who tried many big things in his life right off the bat, he would say, make no little plans, for they have no power to stir the blood of men. I imagine as Burnham is at home with his wife talking about this offer on the table to lead up the design of the World's Fair. He's sitting there listing out all the reasons why he may not be the right person. And his wife stares at him in a loving way, looks at him right in the eye, and repeats something he's said to her many, many times. Make no little plans. Other than to go and accept. And I can imagine how thankful he is to his wife and his partner, John Root, who have both pushed him and framed it because they know who he is, and they know that he's capable, and they know that he has big plans. And of course, Burnham within himself has a sense of pride. And pride has a way of making us take on things that are bigger than we can handle. Things we aren't quite proven in. So Burnham's pride takes him back to the civic leaders, back to Lyman J. Gage, back to George Pullman, back to Charles Schwab, back to Marshall Field, and he says, Yes, I will lead up your fare. What do you need me to do? And they said, Well, we need you to build an entire city in about two years. So naturally, Burnham's Bride said yes. Because who needs sleep? Now I imagine after he accepted, there was some realization of the stakes, and what he had just accepted. What did I just sign up for? If I fail at this, there's gonna be a national embarrassment for America. There's gonna be enormous lost money. And on the other side, the successful side, there's even more at stake. Chicago will be elevated as a city for tourism, bringing in dollars and creating opportunity for everyone. Everyone in the town. American culture will be raised. An investment will take place. That investment creating opportunity to lift others out of poverty. And I will be something more than an architect. I'll have designed an entire city. I'll have some reputation that elevates me a bit above the rest of the industry. That's a lot on the line for a huge project in a tight timeline. Like any enormous project, the first task is dealing with deadlines. Unlike somebody inventing a product, there may be no specific deadline in place. A fair has a start date. Back then the travel was by boat, and it took a long time to get from Europe to the United States. And the fairs have to market so that the people know where to show up, when it's happening, and why they're going to go. There is no moving the deadline. When these people show up, the fair has to be built. You can't have buildings with no roofs on them. It's got to be complete. Burnham, being a master of logistics, started making his plans, timelines, tasks. But he probably knew he was in trouble when his Gantt chart started looking like a game of Tetris. Still, to make a plan like this, you often have to work backwards. Starting with the clear deadline and working to today. And in between, you have to just figure out how to make those timelines work. And within those tasks, he also had great challenges that he didn't even know how to begin on. He had to show America's prowess in engineering, which meant he had to top Gustave's Eiffel Tower from the 1889 World's Fair in Paris. But at the same time, he couldn't just build a larger tower. The United States can't be seen as a derivative of Europe. If so, why would anybody invest here when they could invest in Europe? Why would anybody travel here when they could travel to Europe? The America has to differentiate. And so the centerpiece for this fair has to differentiate from the Eiffel Tower. It can't just be building larger than the Eiffel Tower. To solve that problem, he needed to attract the right people. People with ambition to outdo the tower, people with creativity, people with skills. But Burnham knew how to overcome that. Make no little plans. So he wrote out in competition what he was looking for and started messaging different engineering groups saying we're looking for a centerpiece for the fair. And unfortunately, everybody came back with exactly the wrong solution. Most of the solutions were towers taller than the Eiffel Tower. Some were too fantastical in idea with no possibility, no feasible execution plan for actually bringing them to reality. Such as imagine an extremely tall tower in Chicago that's so tall, and they then put a cart at the top on rails, two steel rails, and it's at such a narrow slope that you get in this cart and it will coast all the way from Chicago to New York, where most of the fair people would depart by boat. Now while that's a great fantasy for the time, if you imagine the hundreds of miles in between the two cities, and the required amount of support towers that would have to be built along that route, and the fact that you would have to get carts back from New York to Chicago at some point, it just wasn't feasible to build. That engineer was George Washington Gail Ferris Jr. And his idea was to build an enormous 250-foot-tall wheel. And today you know this is the Ferris wheel. The Ferris wheel that most people are familiar with at local carnivals do not compare in scale to the one that Ferris was proposing. And this proposal was so shocking that it was rejected at the beginning. It was rejected because at first they thought it wasn't feasible, so Ferris did more calculations. Then it was rejected because they weren't safe, so Ferris, as an engineer, did more structural calculations. He kept pressing and pressing and pressing. With the other ideas coming in being so derivative and tower like, they eventually realized we have to do this. And it was amazing when you think about it, because the statement that it ended up making is that Europe is static. It's been the way that it is for hundreds of years, and it's not going to change. Meanwhile, America is dynamic. We're moving, we're shifting, we're up, we're down, but it was an amazing experience. Now Daniel Burnham had other issues to deal with while building the fair. He struggled with the land that he was given to build the buildings on. Turns out it was swam land with most of the muddy, mucky, soft soil for foundations for these huge, enormous, heavy buildings. So he had to figure out a way to build on that. As he was nearing the end of the fair, and all of the final touches and all of the budget overruns that are possible need more money to make this thing complete, there was a financial crisis. Where's the money? Risk tolerance is low. And by dealing with all of these big, enormous challenges, his partner, John Root, the man that was maybe the most responsible for pushing Burnham into the role of managing all this, died. Burnham's loneliness set in, feeling isolated from partners. His wife is actually in Evanston, Illinois, about forty miles away, and at the time he was maybe seeing her about once a month. And when you lose half of your identity, such as losing a partner that you've been tied in closely with for twenty-two years, you then have to dig deep. Maybe ask yourself who you are.

SPEAKER_02: 28:30

Daniel Burnham leading up the welfare. Everybody's wondering, will he pull it off?

SPEAKER_03: 28:37

Hearing all this news while you're already devastated about your partner and likely your best friend's death, and in mourning from losing the man that you built the company with, Burnham and Root, that gave you all the respect, that gave you the opportunity that you're working on at the moment, was certainly a big blow. But that shoulder ached that chip was still there. And Pride told Burnham that he had to finish what he started. That regardless of whether John Root was there or not, the fair had to become a success. If it didn't, it would ruin both of their legacies. And John Root was no longer alive to defend his. So Burnham did all that he could, which was to stick with the project, work hard, lean on the other successful architects on the team, and the engineers working on the Ferris wheel, and press on. The remainder of the fair had its challenges. It was concerning on whether they would even be able to pay back all the money that was borrowed to build the fair. But they completed it. They say the fair proved America could rival Europe. Honestly, it proved we could overengineer anything if given enough time and budget overruns. But all joking aside, it was a spectacular result of competition and cooperation. All of the men that designed and built the fair were competitors with each other, competing architects that all wanted to be as seen as the best so they could be hired to do the most tremendous work America had to offer. And even though those egos were competing with one another, they managed to build a shared vision. They managed to build spectacular buildings with lights on the outside for the first time ever. The Ferris wheel provided a new sensation to riders never before experienced. Getting in a car with forty other passengers and rising up two hundred feet in the air and looking out at the skyline. That hadn't been done. And while at the fair, the war on currents took a turn. Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla had been arguing between alternating current and direct current for years now. Both are presenting in the pavilions at the fair, but Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse proves alternating current superiority in efficiency and cost. As a direct result of the fair, they won the Niagara Falls power plant contract, which made alternating current a global standard in the new field of electrification. The fair became a blueprint for future cities and started the City Beautiful movement, which shared the belief that spaces should inspire, particularly public spaces should inspire, and not just be functional. It had mass influence on pop culture, in fact Disneyland is modeled on it. Elias Disney was a carpenter who worked on the fair. His son Walt would go on to found Disney. That war of currents was the beginning of electrification, and in fact the white city that was built for the fair was the first lit up entirely by electric lamps and light bulbs. The fair's design itself likely inspired The Wizard of Oz and The Emerald City because Frank L Baum lived just outside of Chicago in Humboldt Park, where he moved in 1891. And he published The Wizard of Oz in 1900, seven years after the fair. While all of this was a triumph for something that took two years to build. Unfortunately, in eighteen ninety-four, after the fair ended, nearly all of the white city built for the fair burned down. So after all those years of toil and heartache, what was Burnham left with? Well Burnham was still a dreamer on a mass scale. And once that work's gone, he's still been transformed in reputation. Daniel Burnham was like a phoenix, reborn after the fair. He was no longer an architect, he was the most influential urban planner in the US and possibly the world at the time. After Burnham had completed the world's fair, if you were doing a project of significant scope that required multiple buildings and required planning something the size of a town, how many people do you think were on that list? Today there's a lot of people that think there aren't enough projects for everybody to do something amazing like that. And that's certainly true. Not everybody can lead up a billion-dollar project. There just aren't enough of them. But the amount of opportunity that there is is growing. Relative to the population, there are more of these projects than there has ever been. The White City cost 27 million dollars. Today that would be 945 million dollars. The reality is that today's gross domestic product of the United States is$22 trillion. Adjusted for inflation, there's about 22,000 people leading up projects this size. In 1890, the gross domestic product was roughly 15 billion. If you divide that by the 27 million dollars, there was only five hundred and fifty-five projects this size. There is a population discrepancy. In eighteen ninety there was sixty-three million people in the United States. Today there's around three hundred and forty million. But when you put all this together, that means that there's roughly five times the odds relative to the population of you being someone to lead up a project of this magnitude compared to a hundred years ago. Today is your opportunity. And it is out there. You can be reborn closer to your true greatness today if you want to be, but you have to step into that metaphorical fire. I sincerely thank you for listening to today's episode. As always, I'm your host, Brandon Donnelly, and it's been great providing you some perspective on Daniel Burnham and his legacy of building the White City. There is so much inspiration out there in the world for engineers, and I know from having gone around and talked to them that there's an enormous amount of passion for this work to be done. Unfortunately, there's a giant chasm between the people who see opportunities and the people that take action on them. While we're all waiting to be the right person to be picked by a group like Daniel Burnham was, there is a lot of opportunity to simply choose yourself as the right person and to start finding others. It's my goal with this podcast to inspire you to be that person who takes on the large challenges and to be the person that maybe even facilitates you in helping find those people. As we seek to build our community. If you're listening to this on YouTube, please subscribe or go to the engineeringpassionexpress.com and follow us for future episodes. While these first episodes all make up season one and are focused on starting something new, picking the problems to work on, and framing your identity and understanding yourself. In the future, we will dive into more technical topics. If you know anyone who you'd like to be a guest on this show, please send me a message on LinkedIn. You can find my profile page in the show notes. And I thank you for being a listener. And I hope you find this show inspiring and a bit educational. If you stay tuned for this long, you're probably looking for a teaser for the next episode. On the next episode, we're gonna look at Daniel Burnham's European counterpart and how he had to fight. And we're gonna seek to understand a little bit more about the financial side of such great engineering teams. I look forward to creating that episode and to sharing it with you all. We'll see you in two weeks.