Tower and Glory
Engineering mastery spawned a new kind of beauty in Eiffel's creation
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.
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.
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