early rocketry Random Corner

•Construction began on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota in 1927 and didn’t finish until 1941, when the monument opened.

•While hammers and chisels are usually used to sculpt faces into a rock face, Mount Rushmore’s head sculptor, Gutzon Borglum (pardon the pun), utilized a munitions expert to remove about 90% of the granite with dynamite — amounting to about 450,000 tons of rocky material.

•Mount Rushmore was named for New York lawyer Charles E. Rushmore, who traveled to the Black Hills in 1885 to inspect mining claims in the region. When asking a local about the name of a nearby mountain, he was told it never had a name before, so he named it after himself. Of course, the landmark did have already have a name, given to it by the Sioux peoples: TȟuŋkášilaŠákpe , or the “Six Grandfathers,” regarded as “the center of the universe” for the Arapahoe, Cheyenne and Lakota, according to an Indigenous-born scholar quoted in 2020 by National Geographic.

•Nine designs for the Rushmore monument were scrapped before ar- riving at Borglum’s final design. Other schemes would have incorporated text into the face sculptures, as well as mock-ups showing the presidents from the waist up. There was even a concept to have a document room behind Lincoln’s head — from which visitors could enter from a carved staircase — but it was cut due to lack of funds.

•A bill introduced in Congress in 1937 proposed to add Susan B. Anthony’s head alongside Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, but it fell through due to a rider on the existing appropriations bill mandating federal funds to be spent only on carvings that had already begun.

•While nobody died during construction of the monument, many workers died in the following years, mainly from a lung condition called silicosis — a pulmonary disease resulting from the inhalation of fine-grained silica. This was because no masks were given to workers, who breathed in large quantities of the dust created by carving and explosions.