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Comment by Judgmentality | Hacker News Reader

I feel like mistaking " for ' is understandable, but how do you not notice 4 floors when you're expecting 40?

Easy "The building will consist of 4Occupied floors." Especially since at the time old-style numerals were common and the number would look more like "4o" anyway. Just put a small space between the 4 and the lowercase o—just enough to be legally ambiguous.

The investors approved blueprints showing the correct dimensions and only 4 floors.

This would have easily been prevented by basic due diligence from the investors. Possibly that is why the courts ruled against them.

Back in those days, typewriters had a single key for the number 1 and the lowercase l. But they did have the O and 0 as different keys.

It is possible that they saw the 4 floors as "representative" of all the floors that would be built, and just expected that there would be 40.

Wichita Falls is pretty much on the Texas/Oklahoma border and that area was filled with oil money at that time. Only 10 years later, Tulsa Oklahoma was building 40+ floor skyscrapers. But prior to that, skyscrapers seemed to be limited to NYC, Philadelphia and Chicago.

The typewriter that I used in high school in the 80s (which dated back to at least the 30s if not earlier) only had the numerals 2–9. One typed l for 1 and O for 0. Typing numbers is not that common an occurrence in any event which made it easy for me to use old-style numerals in papers I wrote in college using LaTeX.

This makes me even more curious about which genius put O and 0 next to each other on the keyboard.

SF had skyscrapers prior to 1920 when this was built. Some of them were damaged in the 1906 earthquake. Perhaps you mean they were mostly associated with NYC, Chicago, etc?

Fun fact, because of that earthquake, there is a 160ft height restriction on certain types of construction in US building codes even to this day!

You are right of course. My apologies :)

There were no skyscrapers in Boston, LA, SF, Houston etc?

I wonder how safe Tulsa skyscrapers are now with all of the earthquakes Oklahoma is experiencing.

Blueprints are just as easy. Draw the first two floors, put in a gap capped with squiggly lines. Label the gap "omitted" or something, then draw the top floor and roof.

I have noticed a number of legal documents spelling out numbers.

40 (forty) floors say

Too late, investors already gave him money by then.

I'm not sure when they gave him the money, but it specifically mentions the investors approved the blueprints with only 4 floors.

I understand people can be lazy and make mistakes, but that's pretty egregious.

Think of the times though, and the engineering savvy of the average person back then.

A comparison for today might be to put the plans for a computer chip in front of an average non-technical small-time investor and then use slippery language to trick them into believing it is something it's not. Tell them it will be the next big thing and will return their money tenfold, and greed does the rest.

It's quite possible back then that the investors, having never seen a skyscraper - or maybe even a proper blueprint - just didn't know what they were looking at, never mind doing any kind of real due diligence.

I heard about a guy who was collecting investments for "innovative" windmills. They (actually) had a small prototype that could handle wind upto 150 mph. And, if scaled up to full size could produce "lots" of electricity. They just needed money to build and test a full size version.

The scam is that windmills don't actually scale very well. If you have 100 MW blowing at the blades, you need a tower that can handle 100 MW of force - or something like that.

Of course, what do I know? I am but a humble computer nerd.

Watt is a unit of power and not force, which is already a hint that things are more complicated than that, says another humble computer nerd

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