Half Of The Operation

From Lewis Hine’s “Photographs of the Empire State Building under construction” collection, “Three workers securing a rivet”:

Actually, it’s two workers securing a rivet while the third watches, but that doesn’t mean the third man did nothing. A fast reminder about rivets: they took a team to install. A rivet came from the factory as a cylinder of steel with a head (usually a dome) on one end. The rivet would be heated – usually as one of a bunch – until it was red hot. A worker with tongs would then grab the rivet and – I am not kidding – toss it from the furnace to where the connection was being made. A worker call a catcher – I am still not kidding – would catch the red-hot chunk of metal in a “bucket” and use tongs to put it in the proper hole. A holder up or backer would push a tool against the pre-formed head to hold it in place while the riveter used a pneumatic hammer to turn the end of the cylinder into another head. With the heads pressing against the plies of steel to be joined, the rivet would cool and shrink, and clamp the pieces of steel together.

So, you’ve got a worker operating the furnace. They might be the one to toss the rivets or that might be a second worker. You’ve got the catcher, and the holder up, and the riveter, and probably a helper running around. Looking at that picture again, the riveter and his pneumatic hammer are on the left, the holder up is in the middle, and the catcher is watching with a funnel-shaped bucket in one hand and tongs in the other.

The connection they’re working on is a column splice. You can see some empty holes between the riveter’s torso and hands. The big round hole in the splice plate was for the crane hook, so the column could be lifted into place. As many rivets as possible were driven in the shop, where conditions made quality control easier: in this case that mean that the splice places came to the field shop-riveted to the lower column and were field-riveted to the upper column.