Excerpt from The City That Is: The Story of the Rebuilding of San Francisco in Three Years Inutile things. It is plain that there has come into modern mechanics a new method, its scope as remarkable as its speed of operation, which surpasses such feats as even a dreamer could lay to the credit of the blacksmith of the gods on Olympus. Vulcan has the solace of much good company, for the San Francisco achievement crowds back into his class the engineers of Babel, the pyramid builders, and a long line of wonder-workers in construction, each great enough in his own day. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.