N the mean time the competing contractors had been obliged to strain every nerve to get their tenders ready by the 10th of July, when, altogether, nineteen were sent in, but eight only were for undertaking the whole of the work; the amounts of these are stated to have ranged between 150,000l. and 120,000l., and this for the use only of the materials for the building. But, at the same time, in accordance with the recommendation and invitation contained in the last part of the Report already quoted, Messrs. Fox, Henderson and Co. presented a tender upon a design entirely different in construction and appearance, though resembling that of the Committee in the general arrangement of the plan.
Exterior View of the Building Committee's Design
This design was by Mr. Joseph Paxton, and resembled in its general form the building as it is now executed, with the exception of the transept and semicircular roof, which were subsequently added, and were suggested by Mr. Barry.
The result of the tenders appears to have been unfavourable to the Committee's design; and in their Report to the Royal Commission on the subject, made a few days afterwards, they proposed to omit the great dome and some portions of the design which were not essential, by which they considered that the cost of its execution might be reduced below 100,000l.; at the same time, they made special mention of Mr. Paxton's design, which, however, they considered would prove more expensive.
Mr. Paxton's design had been brought before the public before this period; for, considering that his best road to success would be to get a favourable verdict from that many-headed jury, he published a view and description of it in the Illustrated News, and, through the influence of Mr. Stephenson, he got his plans laid before the Royal Commission, in consequence of which he obtained an interview with his Royal Highness the President. The encouragement given him by the attention bestowed upon his design by the Royal Commission, and the favourable opinion of the public, had determined him to procure a tender for the execution of the work, to be sent in with those upon the Committee's design. This he was enabled to do by the great energy and promptitude of the contractors, Messrs. Fox and Henderson, to whom he applied at the eleventh hour. The difficulties that had to be overcome, owing to the shortness of the time remaining for the estimates to be made up, can scarcely be better laid before the reader than they have been by an able writer in "Household Words:"—
"It was now Saturday, and only a few days more were allowed for receiving tenders. Yet before an approximate estimate of expense could be formed, the great glass-manufacturers and iron-masters of the north had to be consulted. This happened to be dies mirabilis the third; for it was the identical Saturday on which the Sunday postal question had reached its crisis, and there was to be no delivery the next day! But in a country of electric telegraphs, and of indomitable energy, time and difficulties are annihilated; and it is not the least of the marvels wrought in connexion with the great edifice that, by aid of railway-parcels and the electric telegraph, not only did all the gentlemen summoned out of Warwickshire and Staffordshire appear on Monday morning at Messrs. Fox and Henderson's office, in Spring Gardens, London, to contribute their several estimates to the tender for the whole, but within a week the contractors had prepared every detailed working-drawing, and had calculated the cost of every pound of iron, of every inch of wood, and of every pane of glass.
"There is no one circumstance in the history of the manufacturing enterprise of the English nation which places in so strong a light as this its boundless resources in materials, to say nothing of the arithmetical skill in computing at what cost and in how short a time those materials could be converted to a special purpose. What was done in those few days? Two parties in London, relying on the accuracy and good faith of certain iron-masters, glass-workers in the provinces, and of one master-carpenter in London, bound themselves for a certain sum of money, and in the course of some four months, to cover eighteen acres of ground with a building upwards of a third of a mile long, and some four hundred and fifty feet broad. In order to do this, the glass-maker promised to supply, in the required time, nine hundred thousand square feet of glass (weighing more than four hundred tons), in separate panes, and these the largest that ever were made of sheet glass; each being forty-nine inches long. The iron-master passed his word in like manner to cast in due time three thousand three hundred iron columns, varying from fourteen feet and a half to twenty feet in length: thirty-four miles of guttering-tube, to join every individual column together under the ground; two thousand two hundred and twenty-four girders (but some of these are of wrought iron); besides eleven hundred and twenty-eight bearers for supporting galleries. The carpenter undertook to get ready within the specified period two hundred and five MILES of sash-bar, flooring for an area of thirty-three millions of cubic feet, besides enormous quantities of wooden walling, louvre-work, and partition.[[3]]
"It is not till we reflect on the vast sums of money involved in transactions of this magnitude that we can form even a slight notion of the great, almost ruinous loss, a trifling arithmetical error would have occasioned, and of the boundless confidence the parties must have had in their resources and in the correctness of their computations. Nevertheless, it was one great merit in Mr. Paxton's original details of measurement that they were contrived to facilitate calculation.
"There was little time for consideration, or for setting right a single mistake, were it ever so disastrous. On the prescribed day the tender was presented, with whatever imperfections it might have had, duly and irredeemably sealed. But after-checkings have divulged no material error."