After witnessing the tragic MGM Hotel fire in Las Vegas in 1980, Dan Goodwin, a.k.a. Skyscraperman, or Spider-Dan (as the media preferred to call him), scaled many of the world’s tallest buildings to draw attention to the need to radically modify the methods and equipment used to fight fires and rescue people trapped in towering skyscrapers.
It wasn’t, however, until after the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, that Dan wrote the first draft of The Skyscraper Defense Act. Four years later, after an inspiring conversation with the former Vice President, Dan Quayle, who believed The Skyscraper Defense Act was a matter of National Security, Dan Goodwin began drafting a business plan for a company he appropriately named… Skyscraper Defense.
In 2001, three months prior to 9/11, Dan had placed a book with the literary agent, Peter Miller, in New York City. The last chapters were eerily named, The Looming Threat and The Skyscraper Defense Act. Little did he know the warnings he foreshadowed years before 9/11 would come to fruition in such a gruesome fashion. After witnessing the failed efforts of the fire department to extinguish the fires or rescue the people trapped in the upper floors of the World Trade Center towers, Peter Miller encouraged Dan to take his book to another level…
“If I was you, I would focus my energies on whether we could have put out the fires, whether we could have rescued the people trapped inside, and…”, he stops and holds up his index finger for emphasis, “whether we could have prevented the towers from collapsing.”
And so began Dan’s quest. Skyscraper Defense Inc. was officially incorporated in 2008. Dan Goodwin’s life story, SKYSCRAPERMAN, was published on January 1st 2010 as an e-book on Amazon.com.