The famous face carvings of Mount Rushmore: How were they curved?  

In Hollywood movies many of you have seen a mountain with four faces carved on it. This is a popular tourist site in the Black Hills of South Dakota, US, and is called the Mount Rushmore National Memorial. The mountain has the incredibly detailed faces of four former presidents of the United States—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln—carved into it. The idea was first suggested by Doane Robinson, a historian based in South Dakota, and was executed by Gutzon Borglum, an American sculptor. The plan was to create monumental sculptures in the Black Hills. However, Borglum chose Mont Rushmore instead. The project started in October 1927 and was completed in October 1941. The sculpture makes for a great spectacle for tourists, but it took a lot of time to create the faces. Let us explore some lesser-known facts about this memorial!  

Dynamites were used to carve the faces 
The project was monumental and required removal of 450,000 tons of granite. Chisels definitely wouldn’t have been enough. This is why 90 per cent of the faces were carved using dynamites! When the work started on 2 October, 1927, workers used hammers. After three weeks of hard work and little progress, Borglum decided to try dynamites on 25 October, 1927. Workers had to learn to use dynamites to blast off granite precisely. The drillers bore deep holes inside the granite mountain and then an employee would place sticks of dynamites and sand into each hole from bottom to top. The blasts were carried out during the lunch breaks and evenings, after ensuring that all the workers were safely off the mountain.  

It took 14 years to complete the project! 
Are you wondering how much time it took to complete sculptures of this magnitude? It took 14 years to carve these 60-feet-tall faces of presidents. People working on this sculpture had to dangle off the mountain in bosun’s chair suspended by a 3/8-inch steel wire. Most of the workers also carried heavy instruments and drills atop: Even dynamites! Despite these dangerous conditions, not a single person died while carving the Mount Rushmore Memorial! However, many workers did inhale a lot of silica while working, owing to which many of them got a life-threatening lung disease called silicosis. 

There is a secret room in Mount Rushmore 
Yes, you read that right. This room is known as Hall of Records. But the room could not be completed. So, what remains is a 68-foot-long, 20-feet-high and 12-feet-wide tunnel. Well, it was Borglum’s plan to have a large room with elaborate mosaic walls containing busts of famous Americans. The room was also supposed to have aluminium scrolls depicting important events from the American history and other important documents in glass cabinets. An 800-feet-high granite stairway was to be carved from the base of the mountain to this room behind Lincoln’s head.  

The construction for the grand room began in 1938. However, the work was halted in 1939 due to shortage of funds. The funding became so tight that all the work was solely focussed on completing the faces. Although the tunnel was left incomplete, it contains a small repository placed inside a titanium vault, which is covered by a granite capstone. The repository contains 16 porcelain panels depicting how Mount Rushmore was carved, providing details of Borglum and the reason behind why the four men chosen were carved. 

A failed attempt at the fifth face 
People are quite familiar with the four faces of Mount Rushmore, which belong to the four notable figures of the United States. In 1937, many campaigns emerged to add Susan B Anthony, a popular women's rights activist, to the Mount Rushmore Memorial. However, due to the scarcity of funds, the government decided to include only the first four faces.