As a result, attempts by investors to get their money back through the courts were unsuccessful. It turned out that in the project the engineer indicated the height not in feet, but in inches, which the customers did not pay attention to. A year later, construction was completed, but the height of the building was only 12 meters. McMahon proposed a project for a building with a height of 480 feet (about 146 meters), requesting $ 200, 000 for the work. In addition to residential premises, there was a need for office buildings. In 1912, oil was found in the vicinity of Wichita Falls, causing a sharp influx of settlers into the city. Who and for what merits made this miracle in skyscrapers, and what does the big deception have to do with it? You will find out now. The height of an unremarkable brick turret sticking out of a nondescript barn-like structure is no less than 12 meters. One of these stories tells about the smallest skyscraper in the world, which stands in the Texas city of Wichita Falls. He was never heard from again, and the town was left to decide what to do with the newly embarrassing Newby-McMahon Building.Many wonderful stories begin with big deception, and some of them have a happy ending. Shortly after construction was completed, McMahon skipped town, presumably with the majority of the $200,000 in his pocket. They had no legal recourse against McMahon. The investors never looked closely at the documents and did not grasp the (lack of) scale before signing on.
However, the blueprints he’d drawn up had actually indicated that the building would be 480 inches tall, not 480 feet. Once the investors realized what had happened, they tried to sue McMahon. A narrow staircase was added later, but the building was so narrow that the staircase then took up about 25 percent of the building’s interior. To their surprise, the entire building was only 40 feet tall, 12 feet long, and nine feet wide. To make matters worse, the elevator company McMahon hired had backed out, so visitors could only reach the top floor of the building via an external ladder.
The investors did not realize that there was something off with their investment until, upon completion, they saw that the new “high-rise” they’d been promised was a meager four stories tall.
McMahon used his own construction company and began building without officially getting permission from the land’s owner. They gave him $200,000 – the equivalent of $2.7 million today. His plan was a popular one, and eager investors rushed to be involved in the plan. McMahon’s idea was a skyscraper that would be a fitting monument for the rapidly growing city. McMahon, who owned an oil construction company that occupied one of the offices in the building, proposed an add-on in the empty lot next door to accommodate that need. However, once the boom hit, the town’s need for office space dramatically increased. The original Newby building was a simple one-story office building that had occupied the corner of Seventh and La Salle streets since it was built in 1906 by a railway man named Augustus Newby. The town of Wichita Falls became a hub for the roaring economy, and new industries began to grow as did the town’s population. In the early 20th century, a petroleum boom hit Wichita County, Texas, whose population more than doubled as over 20,000 new residents moved to the area. Wikimedia The Newby-McMahon Building, popularly known as “The World’s Littlest Skyscraper.”
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