Once a joke, now a nation’s pride: the Eiffel Tower

Press, 30 December 1988, Page 10

Once a joke, now a nation’s pride: the Eiffel Tower

FREDERIC SEIGNEUR profiles the remarkable engineer, builder and businessman who gave his name to France’s pioneering tourist tower.

This year France celebrates the bi-centenary of the French Revolution and also the one hundredth anniversary of the Eiffel Tower, inaugurated in 1889 to commemorate the first centenary of the Revolution. Gustave Eiffel was born in Dijon, in 1832. He graduated from the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in 1855. He innovated by substituting laminated iron and steel for cast iron which had, until then, been used for constructive works.

He designed and built a large number of bridges, railway stations and viaducts in France as well as the Tournelles synagogue in Paris, the Bordeaux market, a bank in Paris, casinos, schools and the observatories in Nice and on Mont Blanc. He then built abroad: a station in Budapest, Hungary, the Maria-Pia viaduct on the Douro (whose arch is 160 metres long) and the Viana bridge in Portugal, as well as numerous other constructions in Romania, Spain, Bolivia and Chile.

He drew the plans for San Marcos church in Arica, not to mention the internal metal framework structure of the Statue of Liberty, which his compatriot, Bartholdi, offered to the United States.

Eiffel was thus quite a well-known figure when, in view of the coming universal exhibition of 1889, he asked two of his engineers, Emile Nougier and Maurice Koechlin, to work on building a tower 1,000 feet high. This study required 5,000 technical drawings. Eighteen thousand parts, assembled

with 2,500,000 rivets, were used in the building whose total weight amounted to 7000 tonnes.

Being a businessman, as well as an engineer, Eiffel signed an agreement with the public authorities in January, 1887, by which he would loan 80 per cent

of the funds required for the undertaking. That same year, Eiffel was involved in digging the Panama canal, which, a few years later, caused him to be temporarily and unjustly sentenced in a trial caused by a political and financial scandal.

Eiffel was not an architect but an engineer. The shape of this filigree structure standing on four pedestals was dictated by the laws of physics. Its height, the dimensions of the girders, the diameter and curve of the arches, and the line and shape of the building were determined by mathematical calculations.

As with any design whose boldness is ahead of its time, from the moment building began, the Eiffel tower provoked ironical and even wild criticism from some of Eiffel’s contemporaries. Intellectuals poked fun at the “hollow candlestick,” the “skeleton belfry,” and the “really tragic lamppost.” A petition was signed by such celebrities as Charles Gounod, Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prud’homme and Alexandre Dumas.

But Eiffel paid little heed to this and the tower continued to rise “to the glory of modern science and for the greatest honour of French industry.” On April 1 1889, the tower was inaugurated, lit by 22,000 gas lights. The lifts did not yet work and only 12 of the 200 personalities invited by Eiffel managed to rech the third and last level of the tower, on foot. The Paris municipal council awarded Eiffel the Legion d’Honneur. But at the age of 57, the engineer had no intention of giving up his professional activities. He was interested in building a tunnel under the English Channel and in constructing a Paris metro system, as well as in the first

wireless tests and meteorology. After carrying out experiments on several airships, Eiffel founded the first laboratory for aerodynamics in 1912, thereby

contributing to the development of aviation. During the first World War, he registered a patent for a “high-speed fighter plane.” In 1923, he died but the

Eiffel tower is still standing, no longer reviled, but revered. It even gained some 20 metres in height when radio and television aerials were installed on it.