No, it was just that in the early days of steel (iron), they designed on the assumption that the material was infinitely rigid, and that joints were installed such that loads were all shared equally.
Well joints couldn't be installed "pre-tensioned" so to speak, and there's no way that rivet and bolt holes were going to be installed accurately to tenths of mm, so their entire design process was wrong.
Back in the day they were saved by the fact that steel is elastic, and will share load, and then has a yield followed by plastic deformation, so the overstressed members could yield slightly, and allow adjacent members to pick up the load.
Their original belief would have lead to catastrophic failure, and they were saved by the material properties that they later learned about.
Saw this to great effect when I built the 330 foot diameter "Jupiter 2" in the foreground in the late 90s...a self supporting dome, that started with a large fabricated central disk atop a massive scaffold, and we had to install the legs spoke by spoke (while still having the earthworks on one side open)...as the legs loaded up and relaxed, the risk of crushing the scaffold had to be matched by getting the new members in as the structure came ever so slightly earthward every beam.
