How Ancient Greek Technology Was Used to Sculpt Mount Rushmore

Design­ing their new repub­lic, the Found­ing Fathers of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca looked back to ref­er­ence points in clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty. That instinct con­tin­ued to shape Amer­i­can endeav­ors long there­after, and not just polit­i­cal ones. Take the exam­ple of Mount Rush­more, one of the coun­try’s most pop­u­lar tourist attrac­tions. Orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived in the ear­ly nine­teen-twen­ties as a moun­tain sculp­ture of Amer­i­ca’s wild-west heroes, a means of rais­ing the sta­tus of the fledg­ling state of South Dako­ta, it was soon changed into a stone trib­ute to four pres­i­dents: Found­ing Fathers George Wash­ing­ton and Thomas Jef­fer­son as well as Abra­ham Lin­coln and Theodore Roo­sevelt.

Mount Rush­more’s sculp­tor Gut­zon Bor­glum sug­gest­ed the switch from region­al fig­ures to nation­al ones, and it would­n’t be the last good idea he would bring to the table. As explained in the Pri­mal Space video above, he also fig­ured out how to repli­cate his ini­tial sculp­ture of the four pres­i­dents, made at one-twelfth-scale, on a 500-foot-tall cliff edge.

Build­ing all the nec­es­sary infra­struc­ture on and around the moun­tain con­sti­tut­ed a major project in and of itself. But when the work­ers got into their har­ness­es, how would they know where to direct their jack­ham­mers into the rock? To guide them, Bor­glum adapt­ed a mechan­i­cal tech­nique used by ancient Greeks to copy stat­ues, a “point­ing machine” that could “mea­sure spe­cif­ic points on a sculp­ture rel­a­tive to a ref­er­ence point,” mak­ing a three-dimen­sion­al shape trans­fer­able from one sculp­ture to anoth­er.

Bor­glum designed a large-scale point­ing machine that could be installed atop the moun­tain and posi­tioned to show work­ers where and how deep to drill. Though the sys­tem worked well, the team could only make progress so fast: after four­teen years, Mount Rush­more remained incom­plete when Bor­glum’s death and World War II put a stop to it alto­geth­er. Yet enough had been fin­ished to give it the icon­ic appear­ance that has made it rec­og­niz­able the world over, if not always by name. When I recent­ly gave a talk about Amer­i­can his­to­ry to some young stu­dents in South Korea, where I live, one of them iden­ti­fied a pho­to of Mount Rush­more as Mount Olym­pus — and, in a civ­i­liza­tion­al sense, maybe she was on to some­thing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold Ancient Egypt­ian, Greek & Roman Sculp­tures in Their Orig­i­nal Col­or

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Restores the Orig­i­nal Col­ors to Ancient Stat­ues

How Ancient Greek Stat­ues Real­ly Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Col­ors and Pat­terns

3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculp­tures, Stat­ues & Art­works: Down­load & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

How Mon­u­ment Val­ley Became the Most Icon­ic Land­scape of the Amer­i­can West

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.