Gustav Eiffel’s dream tower gets a $24M slimmer’s diet

Press, 9 November 1984, Page 14

Gustav Eiffel’s dream tower gets a $24M slimmer’s diet

From

LAURENCE MARKS,

in Paris

One of the world’s best-loved monuments, the Eiffel Tower, has been given a $24 million facelift. Like an old house that has passed through several owners it has accumulated numerous alterations and improvements in the 95 years since it was built.

The majestic simplicity of Gustav Eiffel’s original design had been confused by a clutter of additional pavilions and intermediate floors of brick and blockwork required to serve a variety of scientific uses.

Every few years, a new coat of paint had added another 45 tons to the load. The structure was beginning to buckle under its own weight A survey revealed ominous twisting and distortion, particularly of the first-level ring-beams. The top platform had been closed to the public for five months every year because freezing stalled the antiquated hydraulic lifts that carried visitors up from the second level. Now, the tower has shed 1100 tons in a three-year restoration programme. Unnecessary floors have been removed. Thick surplus layers of paint have been stripped. Scientific uses have been rationalised.

The original spiral staircases between the second level and the top has been replaced by straight flights with security grilles (the tower has long been Paris’s favourite jumping-off point for suicides, outranking Notre Dame and the Seine bridges).

The lifts to the top have been replaced by a pair of Otis doublecars with a capacity of 40 people, and another Otis lift installed in the south pier giving direct access to the panoramic restaurant just completed on the second level. There is now a cinema, a post office, and a conference hall. The Eiffel Tower company, in which the City of Paris has a 60 per cent stake, says that the operation has guaranteed another 100 years of stability for an iron structure that was destined under the terms of the original contracts to be demolished early in the twentieth century.

The 1000 ft Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 International Exhibition to commemorate the

centenary of the French Revolution. It was intended as a display of France’s engineering skills and a nationalist celebration of the country’s extraordinary industrial recovery in the two decades after defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Today, the tower needs no other justification than its potency as a civic symbol and its visual charm as an unforgettable part of the Paris scene. But a Victorian urge to dignify it with some utilitarian purpose was present from the moment of its conception, and haunted Eiffel all his life. A hundred entries were submitted for the Government competition. One proposed a giant gardensprinkler that could be used to water Paris in case of drought. Another proposed a tour soleil with a powerful electric lamp at the top which, by a system of carefully placed parabolic mirrors, -would illuminate the whole of the city at night with eight times the amount of light required for read-

ing a newspaper.

A third proposed a high-altitude clinic for consumptives. The most macabre took the form of a huge model of the guillotine. Nobody was certain that a tower of that height was either possible or safe. The tallest existing structure was then the 555 ft Washington Monument, completed in 1884. It was built of stone.

Eiffel, who was 53, had made his professional reputation and his fortune building railway bridges and viaducts. He knew that his great enemy would be the wind. Steel would be too light and flexible a material, its elasticity producing intolerable sway. Cast iron would be too brittle and lacking in tensile strength. The dilatory French Government had left too little time for traditional construction in stone, whose performance at that height was in any case problematic. Eiffel chose wrought iron, developing a revolutionary system of lattice-trussed piers with in-curv-ing edges that theoretically made it possible to construct towers of any height. He recognised that wind resistance would be achieved not through the accumulation of

mass but by reducing the supporting elements of an openwork structure until the wind had nothing to seize. The strength of the Eiffel Tower lies in its voids as much as in its iron.

The management of the pioneering project was as brilliant as its design. Eiffel built it in 27 months entirely from prefabricated parts. He brought it in six per cent under the $1.6 million budget. Despite the hazards of the nineteenth-century engineering, only one life was lost during constructon. The Brooklyn Bridge took 20 lives, Scotland’s Forth Bridge 57, Quebec Bridge 84. The casualty rate on England’s Great Western Railway a decade earlier had been greater than that at the Battle of Waterloo.

When the tower began to rise, Parisians became alarmed over its safety. Eiffel was treated as a madman. Insurers refused cover. A professor of mathematics predicted that, if it ever reached 748 ft, it would ineluctably collapse. When it was finished, another writer, Guy de Maupassant, describing it as “an unavoidable and tormenting nightmare,” took to lunching in its restaurant because, he said, it was the one place in Paris you could be sure of not having to look' at it. (Gounod relented, ascending to the 900 ft third level to play the piano — a world record for piano-movers as well as for musicians.) The tower was quickly recognised as a triumph. It remained the world’s tallest structure until New York’s Chrysler Building, built of stone, opened in 1930. Eiffel, professionally damaged by the Panama Canal Company scandal, built nothing more. He devoted the rest of his life, until his death in 1923 at the age of 91, to encouraging scientific uses of the tower. These have included TV and radio transmission, meteorology, aerodynamics, and the measurement of air pollution.

It was not declared an historic national monument until 1964, but its true apotheosis had occurred 20 years earlier. On August 25, 1944, while the French Second Armoured Division were battling with retreating German Panzers in the street below, staff from the nearby Naval Museum raised the Tricolour over the tower for the first time since the fall of Paris four years earlier. Every Parisian who looked up at the Eiffel Tower that afternoon knew that the occupation was over. Copyright — London Observer