By Robert Kunzig
Seldom has a builder enjoyed a more glorious triumph than Gustave Eiffel did on March 31, 1889. The French flag, he announced proudly after hoisting it himself into a cracking wind at his tower's inaugural, was now flying "on the tallest edifice yet built by man"--at 1,000 feet, it was nearly twice as tall as its nearest rival, the Washington Monument. Eiffel had built it to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, as part of a Universal Exposition designed to show the world what France and science could do. He had built it on time, in just 26 months, and under budget. Vive l'ingenieur Eiffel! Vive la France! Vive la republique! For France and for Eiffel that day, the sky seemed the limit.

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Four years later, the sky had fallen. Eiffel's further plans for projects such as a tunnel under the English Channel were gathering dust, and the master builder found himself in prison. He had been condemned for breach of trust in the failure of France's Panama Canal project--a bankruptcy that wiped out the savings of hundreds of thousands of French investors. After eight days he was freed on a technicality. Stepping out of the prison gates, according to his biographer Eric Deschodt, Eiffel wept as he fell into the arms of his son. He was 61, with 30 years to live. But as a builder, and one of the greatest of his age, he was finished.

So much drama in those years--and drama has rarely had a less dramatic protagonist. Eiffel was from head to toe a businessman, clever with a contract. He was anxious for material success and respectability (and dismally unromantic, as six failed courtships attest). And he was through and through a scientific engineer--one who calculated everything in advance and with great precision. No trial and error or on-site improvisation for Eiffel: In his prefabricated iron beams, the rivet holes always lined up.

So how, precisely, did this calculating, pragmatic man, with no romance or rebellion in him, come to shock artists of the time with a structure so avant-garde it is still fresh and delightful today? How did he build a "monument to inutility," as another biographer, Michel Carmona, calls it, "that is above all else a triumph of imagination"?

Building bridges. A small part of the answer is that it wasn't Eiffel who imagined the tower. In the spring of 1884, when the idea emerged from the studios of Eiffel & Co., colossal structures were in the air. The Washington Monument was nearing its final height, 555 feet of old-fashioned marble and granite. In a Paris workshop, finishing touches were being put on the Statue of Liberty, for which Eiffel had designed the iron skeleton.

Even the idea of a 1,000-foot iron tower was not new; American engineers had designed one for the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 but had never built it. When Paris officials asked the prominent and well-connected Eiffel to propose a monument on the Champ de Mars for their own centennial fair, he asked his staff for ideas. A 28-year-old engineer named Maurice Koechlin, Eiffel's chief of research, drew the initial sketch. Eiffel was not bowled over at first. But he had nothing better to propose to his potential clients--and they liked it.

Koechlin's tower was spare, an iron skeleton like a giant oil derrick or, more to the point, a bridge pier. (Grace notes, including decorative arches under the first platform, were added later, by an architect.) In effect, Koechlin was building on what he had learned from the master. Eiffel had started his first railway bridge, over the Garonne River at Bordeaux, when he was only 26, and by 1884 his iron lattice bridges were all over France and Europe. His masterpiece, the Garabit viaduct in the Massif Central mountains, was being completed as Koechlin drew the tower. It was supported by giant piers and a central arch that rose 400 feet above the Truyere River. It was an audacious, spidery thing that only Eiffel had the know-how to attempt--and it was the model for the tower. (The bridge is still in use and is a tourist attraction in its own right.) "The solutions to the problems the tower posed had already been worked out for the bridges," says Miriam Levin, a historian of technology at Case Western Reserve University. "They weren't going to do anything too experimental in the middle of Paris."

The great threat to any tall structure is wind; in 1879, gales had toppled the Tay Bridge in Scotland, dropping a train and 75 passengers into the Firth of Tay. Eiffel's solution, at Garabit and on the Champ de Mars, was to stiffen his structures with lacy truss work that gave the wind nothing to push on. Amazingly, the Eiffel Tower is even more delicate than it looks. The 16 columns that support it, forming the corners of its four legs, are actually hollow. All the wrought iron in the tower weighs about 7,300 metric tons, less than what the air in an imaginary cylinder big enough to hold the tower would weigh.

Eiffel's other answer to the wind was the tower's distinctive tapering shape. It was not an artistic choice; it was dictated by a mathematical analysis of the forces involved. The shape is such that the push of the wind on any given section of the tower combines with the weight above that section to create a force pointing down one of the curving uprights, thus channeling the load safely to the ground. "Before coming together at the high pinnacle," he wrote, "the uprights appear to burst out of the ground, and in a way to be shaped by the action of the wind."

Barbarous. The master engineering helped to create a new kind of beauty in which structure revealed itself proudly--and when those uprights first started bursting from the Champ de Mars, Parisian artists howled. A few dozen of them drafted a public protest, pointing out--among other low blows--that even "commercial America" had not wanted a structure so "vertiginously ridiculous" and "barbarous." One of the few signatories whose name is still well known outside France, Guy de Maupassant, later wrote that he had left Paris because he couldn't stand the sight of the tower.

Eiffel couldn't understand the criticism. "The first principle of architectural aesthetics," he wrote in a reply to the artists, "is that the essential lines of a monument should be dictated by a perfect adaptation to its purpose." Or as the American architect Louis Sullivan would put it a decade later, in what became the dictum of modernist architecture: "Form ever follows function." Hindsight has vindicated Eiffel and made his critics look ridiculous.

He was vindicated, too, of any outright illegality in the Panama fiasco. But though his fortune was safe, his reputation never recovered in time to do him much good. He spent a lot of time after that on his tower, using it for meteorological observations and experiments in aerodynamics. Later it saw service as a telegraph antenna. That helped preserve the tower, originally meant to be dismantled after 20 years, until it could gain untouchable status.

But its main function has always been just to stand up to the wind and be climbed. Two million people ignored the outraged artists and visited it the first year, and these days it is 6 million a year. "That's 12 million shoes rubbing on the sheet metal," says Yannick Bourse, the chief engineer of the tower today, who sits in a cramped office in the north pedestal, with Koechlin's drawing facing him on the opposite wall. The iron tower's chief enemy, Bourse explains, is corrosion; the remedy is regular coats of a special zinc-based paint, applied only with brushes. This month the tower is emerging from the latest 15-month application of "Eiffel Tower brown." With continued care, Bourse thinks, his charge could endure for centuries more.

He doesn't worry about the wind at all. During a storm that ravaged France in December 1999--downing 100,000 trees in the park at Versailles, for instance--a record wind speed of 133 mph was recorded at the top of the tower. "Nothing happened," Bourse says. "The vertical moved 9 centimeters."