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History of the Eiffel Tower
The Design of the Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 Paris Exposition and was not intended to be permanent.
♦ The Exposition Universelle of 1889, held during the year of the 100th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, was used to showcase scientific and technological advances. The main symbol of the Fair was the Eiffel Tower, which served as the entrance arch to the Fair.
The Eiffel Tower was going to be demolished in 1909, but was saved because it was repurposed as a giant radio antenna.
♦ Designer Gustave Eiffel had a permit for the tower to stand for 20 years after the Exposition. It was to be dismantled in 1909, and in fact, part of the original contest rules for designing the tower was that it should be easy to dismantle. However, the tower proved to be valuable for communication purposes, so it was allowed to remain after the expiry of the permit.
The Eiffel Tower is the most-visited paid monument in the world: 6.07 million people in 2018.
♦ Back in September 2017, the monument recorded its 300 millionth visitor overall since it first opened in 1889.
During WW2, when Hitler visited Paris, the French cut the lift cables on the Eiffel Tower so that Hitler would have to climb the steps if he wanted to reach the top.
♦During the Nazi occupation, the tower was closed to the public. When the Allies were nearing Paris in August 1944, Hitler ordered General Dietrich von Choltitz, the military governor of Paris, to demolish the tower along with the rest of the city, but Von Choltitz disobeyed the order.
Con artist Victor Lustig "sold" the Eiffel Tower to a scrap metal dealer.
♦ Widely regarded as one of the most notorious con artists of his time, Lustig met with scrap metal dealers and convinced them that the French government wished to sell the tower for scrap. After one of them agreed to pay Lustig a large bribe to secure ownership of the tower, the con man took his bribe and fled to Austria.
The Eiffel Tower was originally intended for Barcelona, Spain, but the project was rejected.
♦ According to the rumour, Eiffel and his company first pitched the designs for the tower to Barcelona, which hosted its own version of the World Fair the year before, in 1888.
The height of the Eiffel Tower varies by 5.9 inches (15 cm) due to temperature changes.
♦ This is due to thermal expansion of the metal on the side facing the sun.
1,665 steps are needed to climb all the way to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
♦ You can take the 674 steps from the bottom of the Eiffel Tower up to the 2nd Floor. From there, you'll face another 991 steps to the top, but those are not open to the public.
The Eiffel Tower is the tallest structure
in Paris: 324 metres (1,063 ft) high.
♦ That's about the same height as an 81-storey building. During its construction, the Eiffel Tower surpassed the Washington Monument to become the tallest man-made structure in the world, a title it held for 41 years.
A woman named Erika La Tour Eiffel "married" the Eiffel Tower in 2007.
♦ She has a bizarre fetish for inanimate objects and changed her name legally to reflect the 'marriage'.
There are 20,000 light bulbs on the Eiffel Tower.
♦ 5,000 light bulbs per side bring the monument to life for 5 minutes every hour on the hour once the Tower has been lit up until 1 am.
There are over 30 replicas of the Eiffel Tower around the world.
♦ The Tokyo Tower is actually taller than the Eiffel Tower, while the one in Las Vegas is about half its size. There's another in Shenzhen, Berlin, Nagoya, Prague, Guatemala City and even in Oblast, Russia.
The paint on the Eiffel Tower weighs as much as 10 elephants.
♦ The Tower requires 60 tonnes of paint for a surface of 250,000 m2. It has been re-painted 18 times since its initial construction, an average of once every seven years.
Gustave Eiffel had an apartment for himself at the top of the Eiffel Tower.
♦ Gustave Eiffel used his apartment at the top of the tower to entertain guests and carry out meteorological observations.
In 1891, London built a structure designed to surpass the Eiffel Tower in height. It was unsteady, never completed and demolished in 1907.
♦ Led by the railway entrepreneur Sir Edward Watkin, the ambitious project was a 358-metre (1,175 ft)-high visitor attraction right where the Wembley Stadium is located today. It was never finished because the construction company experienced problems financing the project and went into voluntary liquidation in 1899.
Gustave Eiffel, the man who designed the Eiffel Tower, was also behind the design for the Statue of Liberty's spine.
♦ Eiffel had experience with wind stresses, so he devised a structure consisting of a four-legged pylon to support the copper sheeting which made up the body of the statue. The entire statue was erected in Paris, dismantled, and shipped to the U.S.
At the time of its construction, the Eiffel Tower was the tallest building in the world.
♦ It was twice as tall as the Tower of Cologne Cathedral, the world's tallest structure since 1880.
300 workers, 18,038 pieces of wrought iron and 2.5 million rivets were needed to build the Eiffel Tower.
♦ The drawing office produced 1,700 general drawings and 3,629 detailed drawings of the 18,038 different parts needed. If any part did not fit, it was sent back to the factory for alteration.
If the Eiffel Tower was built today, it would cost about US$31 million.
♦ That's not too far from the 8 million cost in 1890 Francs, which is around 36 million in 2015 U.S. dollars. The materials are estimated to be worth $1 million, but labor would be about $30 million.
The Eiffel Tower was almost temporarily relocated to Canada in 1967.
♦ The idea of bringing the Eiffel Tower to Montreal for Expo 67 was pursued very seriously, so much so that Gen. Charles de Gaulle was persuaded to give his official blessing to the project. While feasible, the idea was found to be too expensive.
In 1902, a lightning strike damaged the upper section of the Eiffel Tower, requiring the reconstruction of its top.
♦ This fixing also increased the height by 5.1 m (17 ft).
The Eiffel Tower is not fully illuminated 24/7. Since 2013, it shuts off the lights at 1AM to save energy.
♦ There's a law making it obligatory for businesses, stores and public buildings across France, including Paris, to turn off lights in shop windows and on façades between 1am and 7am.
Novelist Guy de Maupassant denounced the Eiffel Tower as a "useless and monstrous" structure. He liked to eat his meals in the restaurant at the tower's base, as it was the only place where he didn't have to look at it.
♦ Guy de Maupassant never accepted the tower. Annoyed by its immense popularity, he couldn’t stand the sight of his iron arch nemesis, which seemed to follow him whenever he wanted to stroll around the center of Paris.
The Eiffel Tower was inaugurated the same year Nintendo was founded and Adolf Hitler was born: 1889.
♦ 1889 was also the year the Coca-Cola Company originally incorporated as the Pemberton Medicine Company, Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night and the first issue of The Wall Street Journal was published.
It is illegal to reproduce photos of the Eiffel Tower at night.
♦ European Union copyright law states that an artistic work (e.g. a photo, video, song, or building) is protected during the lifetime of its creator, plus another 70 years. Since the lights were not installed until 1985 and are considered an artistic work, they are well within their copyright protection period.
In 1891, a ride was planned that would drop passengers in free fall from the top of the Eiffel Tower into a pond at the bottom.
♦ The shell would have hit the water at over 170 miles an hour, a speed at which no human being had ever traveled at that time.
Inventor Franz Reichelt died by jumping from the Eiffel Tower while testing a parachute of his own design.
♦ Initial experiments conducted with dummies dropped from the fifth floor of his apartment building had been successful, so he received permission to conduct a test from the Eiffel Tower. On arrival, he made it clear that he intended to, instead, jump personally. Despite attempts to dissuade him, he jumped and the parachute failed to deploy, plummeting 57 metres (187 ft) to his death.
The Tower is not Gustave Eiffel’s only creation. This enthusiast and true genius was able to go beyond his own limits to bequeath to us monuments such as the dome on the Nice Observatory, the metallic structure of the Statue of Liberty, not to mention the Bordeaux railway bridge.
Sauvestre proposed stonework pedestals to dress the legs, monumental arches to link the columns and the first level, large glass-walled halls on each level, a bulb-shaped design for the top and various other ornamental features to decorate the whole of the structure. In the end the project was simplified, but certain elements such as the large arches at the base were retained, which in part give it its very characteristic appearance.
The curvature of the uprights is mathematically determined to offer the most efficient wind resistance possible. As Eiffel himself explains: "All the cutting force of the wind passes into the interior of the leading edge uprights. Lines drawn tangential to each upright with the point of each tangent at the same height, will always intersect at a second point, which is exactly the point through which passes the flow resultant from the action of the wind on that part of the tower support situated above the two points in question. Before coming together at the high pinnacle, the uprights appear to burst out of the ground, and in a way to be shaped by the action of the wind".
The Koechlin's plan
Details construction & operation Otis elevators - B & W engraving Paris Exhibition 1889
The construction:
The assembly of the supports began on July 1, 1887 and was completed twenty-two months later.
All the elements were prepared in Eiffel’s factory located at Levallois-Perret on the outskirts of Paris. Each of the 18,000 pieces used to construct the Tower were specifically designed and calculated, traced out to an accuracy of a tenth of a millimetre and then put together forming new pieces around five metres each. A team of constructors, who had worked on the great metal viaduct projects, were responsible for the 150 to 300 workers on site assembling this gigantic erector set.
The rivet workers;
All the metal pieces of the tower are held together by rivets, a well-refined method of construction at the time the Tower was constructed. First the pieces were assembled in the factory using bolts, later to be replaced one by one with thermally assembled rivets, which contracted during cooling thus ensuring a very tight fit. A team of four men was needed for each rivet assembled: one to heat it up, another to hold it in place, a third to shape the head and a fourth to beat it with a sledgehammer. Only a third of the 2,500,000 rivets used in the construction of the Tower were inserted directly on site.
The uprights rest on concrete foundations installed a few metres below ground-level on top of a layer of compacted gravel. Each corner edge rests on its own supporting block, applying to it a pressure of 3 to 4 kilograms per square centimetre, and each block is joined to the others by walls.
On the Seine side of the construction, the builders used watertight metal caissons and injected compressed air, so that they were able to work below the level of the water.
The tower was assembled using wooden scaffolding and small steam cranes mounted onto the tower itself.
The assembly of the first level was achieved by the use of twelve temporary wooden scaffolds, 30 metres high, and four larger scaffolds of 40 metres each.
"Sand boxes" and hydraulic jacks - replaced after use by permanent wedges - allowed the metal girders to be positioned to an accuracy of one millimetre.
On December 7, 1887, the joining of the major girders up to the first level was completed. The pieces were hauled up by steam cranes, which themselves climbed up the Tower as they went along using the runners to be used for the Tower's lifts.
It only took five months to build the foundations and twenty-one to finish assembling the metal pieces of the Tower.
Considering the rudimentary means available at that period, this could be considered record speed. The assembly of the Tower was a marvel of precision, as all chroniclers of the period agree. The construction work began in January 1887 and was finished on March 31, 1889. On the narrow platform at the top, Eiffel received his decoration from the Legion of Honour.
Journalist Emile Goudeau describes the spectacle visiting the construction site at the beginning of 1889.
"A thick cloud of tar and coal smoke seized the throat, and we were deafened by the din of metal screaming beneath the hammer. Over there they were still working on the bolts: workmen with their iron bludgeons, perched on a ledge just a few centimetres wide, took turns at striking the bolts (these in fact were the rivets). One could have taken them for blacksmiths contentedly beating out a rhythm on an anvil in some village forge, except that these smiths were not striking up and down vertically, but horizontally, and as with each blow came a shower of sparks, these black figures, appearing larger than life against the background of the open sky, looked as if they were reaping lightning bolts in the clouds."
Debate and controversy surrounding the Eiffel Tower:
Even before the end of its construction, the Tower was already at the heart of much debate. Enveloped in criticism from the biggest names in the world of Art and Literature, the Tower managed to stand its ground and achieve the success it deserved.
Various pamphlets and articles were published throughout the year of 1886, le 14 février 1887, la protestation des Artistes.
The "Protest against the Tower of Monsieur Eiffel", published in the newspaper Le Temps, is addressed to the World's Fair's director of works, Monsieur Alphand. It is signed by several big names from the world of literature and the arts : Charles Gounod, Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas junior, François Coppée, Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, William Bouguereau, Ernest Meissonier, Victorien Sardou, Charles Garnier and others to whom posterity has been less kind.
Other satirists pushed the violent diatribe even further, hurling insults like : "this truly tragic street lamp" (Léon Bloy), "this belfry skeleton" (Paul Verlaine), "this mast of iron gymnasium apparatus, incomplete, confused and deformed" (François Coppée), "this high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders, this giant ungainly skeleton upon a base that looks built to carry a colossal monument of Cyclops, but which just peters out into a ridiculous thin shape like a factory chimney" (Maupassant), "a half-built factory pipe, a carcass waiting to be fleshed out with freestone or brick, a funnel-shaped grill, a hole-riddled suppository" (Joris-Karl Huysmans).
Once the Tower was finished the criticism burnt itself out in the presence of the completed masterpiece, and in the light of the enormous popular success with which it was greeted. It received two million visitors during the World's Fair of 1889.
An extract from the "Protest against the Tower of Monsieur Eiffel", 1887:
"We come, we writers, painters, sculptors, architects, lovers of the beauty of Paris which was until now intact, to protest with all our strength and all our indignation, in the name of the underestimated taste of the French, in the name of French art and history under threat, against the erection in the very heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower which popular ill-feeling, so often an arbiter of good sense and justice, has already christened the Tower of Babel. (...)
Is the City of Paris any longer to associate itself with the baroque and mercantile fancies of a builder of machines, thereby making itself irreparably ugly and bringing dishonour ? (...). To comprehend what we are arguing one only needs to imagine for a moment a tower of ridiculous vertiginous height dominating Paris,just like a gigantic black factory chimney, its barbarous mass overwhelming and humiliating all our monuments and belittling our works of architecture, which will just disappear before this stupefying folly.
And for twenty years we shall see spreading across the whole city, a city shimmering with the genius of so many centuries, we shall see spreading like an ink stain, the odious shadow of this odious column of bolted metal.
Gustave Eiffel’s Response:
In an interview in the newspaper Le Temps of February 14 1887, Eiffel gave a reply to the artists' protest, neatly summing up his artistic doctrine:
"For my part I believe that the Tower will possess its own beauty. Are we to believe that because one is an engineer, one is not preoccupied by beauty in one's constructions, or that one does not seek to create elegance as well as solidity and durability ? Is it not true that the very conditions which give strength also conform to the hidden rules of harmony ? (...) Now to what phenomenon did I have to give primary concern in designing the Tower ? It was wind resistance.
Well then ! I hold that the curvature of the monument's four outer edges, which is as mathematical calculation dictated it should be (...) will give a great impression of strength and beauty, for it will reveal to the eyes of the observer the boldness of the design as a whole. Likewise the many empty spaces built into the very elements of construction will clearly display the constant concern not to submit any unnecessary surfaces to the violent action of hurricanes, which could threaten the stability of the edifice. Moreover there is an attraction in the colossal, and a singular delight to which ordinary theories of art are scarcely applicable".
The plan to build a tower 300 metres high was conceived as part of preparations for the World's Fair of 1889.
The wager was to "study the possibility of erecting an iron tower on the Champ-de-Mars with a square base, 125 metres across and 300 metres tall". Selected from among 107 projects, it was that of Gustave Eiffel, an entrepreneur, Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier, both engineers, and Stephen Sauvestre, an architect, that was accepted.
Emile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin, the two chief engineers in Eiffel's company, had the idea for a very tall tower in June 1884. It was to be designed like a large pylon with four columns of lattice work girders, separated at the base and coming together at the top, and joined to each other by more metal girders at regular intervals.
The tower project was a bold extension of this principle up to a height of 300 metres - equivalent to the symbolic figure of 1000 feet. On September 18 1884 Eiffel registered a patent "for a new configuration allowing the construction of metal supports and pylons capable of exceeding a height of 300 metres".
In order to make the project more acceptable to public opinion, Nouguier and Koechlin commissioned the architect Stephen Sauvestre to work on the project's appearance.
The Bois de Boulogne is a huge forested area to the west of central Paris. Formerly used for royal hunts, the Boulogne forest is now the recreational playground for many Parisians. There are a number of lakes in the park, the largest of which are Lac Superieur and Lac Inferieur.
Mar 9, 2021