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