Note 1—page 26.
Use of Iron.
One must go to England to appreciate the value of iron, the scarcity of wood having obliged the English to apply it to a great number of purposes to which no one on the continent would dream of its being applicable. At every step and under all forms, you meet with cast-iron, bar-iron, sheet-iron, and steel; machines, piles, columns of all dimensions from two inches to four feet in diameter, water-pipes and gas-pipes, posts, grates, bridges, roofs, floors, whole quays and roads, of iron. But for it, those light and airy structures, so slender in appearance, yet supporting such enormous weights, the huge six story warehouses of St Catharine's docks for instance, would be heavy and gloomy dungeons. The gas which comes from a distance of seven or eight miles, is made and brought in by the aid of iron. Those bridges, springing as it were across the water, those graceful and elegant footways across the canals, as well as the fluted columns of Regent's Street, are of iron, cast or wrought. The quantity of pig-iron annually produced in Great Britain and Ireland, is about 800,000 tons; in France it amounted in 1834 to 269,000 tons, beside 177,000 tons of bar iron. The ordinary price of both kinds with us is about double the price in England.
Until the present day, stone has been almost the only material employed in durable works of architecture; but stone having much less cohesive force than iron, is only suited to the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman styles of architecture. The light and airy architecture of the Middle Ages, requires a material possessing great strength in a small compass, such as the metals; and some attempts have already been made in France and Germany to apply cast-iron to the construction of Gothic structures. Stone has already done all that it is capable of doing, and we can have nothing new in architecture, except by means of new materials. In my opinion, iron is to be the instrument of this regeneration of the architectural art. The price of pig-iron is now so low, that the cost of a building of this material, would not exceed that of one constructed of hewn stone.