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Comment by eddieh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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?

You are right of course. My apologies :)

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!

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.

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

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