Читать книгу The Pilot Who Wore a Dress: And Other Dastardly Lateral Thinking Mysteries - Tom Cutler, Tom Cutler - Страница 23

The mystery

Tall buildings are nothing new. Blocks of high-rise flats were all the rage in Ancient Rome, where they rose to a height of ten or more storeys. Some Roman emperors took against them, though, getting their togas in a right tangle trying to set a height limit on the pesky things, but without much luck. If an emperor can’t get something like that done it makes you wonder about your own planning department down at the town hall.

It wasn’t just Rome, either. Twelfth-century Bologna had many high-rise apartment blocks too, something like 180 of them. It looked like an ancient New York. The tallest of these buildings – which hasn’t fallen down over the centuries – is the Asinelli Tower, one of the so-called Duo Torri (Two Towers) that together resemble the old World Trade Center. The Asinelli Tower is 319 feet high, and I can imagine the 12th-century Bolognese sitting down to eat their spaghetti at sunset, grumpily looking out over the red roofs of the city and writing endless letters to the council to complain about being overlooked.

But neither the Roman nor the Bolognese towers were really skyscrapers. This term was first used in the late 19th century to describe steel-frame buildings of ten storeys or more. Nowadays it can refer to any very tall multi-storey building, most often one covered in big windows.

The oldest iron-frame building in the world, and the grandfather of the skyscraper, is the Maltings in Shrewsbury, which went up in 1797. However, as with the Roman tower blocks, there were complaints. And it was the same in 19th-century London, when a British empress took a leaf out of the Roman emperors’ book.

Queen Victoria, Empress of India, had a really good moan about tall buildings going up near Buckingham Palace, and to mollify the monarch height limits were introduced, which continued to be enforced until the 1950s. Prince Charles carries on the good fight today in an effort to prevent the building of ugly high-rise buildings in London, and pushing to have The Gherkin thatched. I’ve noticed that, rather like the Romans, he’s not having much luck.

Many office employees today work in skyscrapers, and one of the benefits is the fun of watching the guys who clean the windows from special cradles trying to cope with the high winds, and being stared at.

It was in 2012 that Horace Morris, an experienced 60-year-old window cleaner who was working on a window on the 40th floor of the 94-storey Alto Tower, near London Bridge, had a spot of trouble. Horace was smoking a cigarette and whistling along to the radio. He had cleaned the windows many times before and was not really paying proper attention to what he was doing.

As he was reaching across to get to a particularly dirty patch in a tricky corner, Horace slipped off his support and fell.

The problem

Horace was not wearing any kind of safety harness or other device, just his workwear. His clothes were not padded, he had no safety hat – or any hat – and there was nothing to slow his fall. Yet when he hit the ground Horace merely shook his head, rubbed his sore hands together, and stood up. He had broken no bones, and had only a slight scratch to his palm, a sore knuckle, a bent thumb and two very achy knees. How come?

Tap here for the solution.