“This Odious Column of Bolted Metal”
In the late 1880’s, to honor the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, the French government began planning the 1889 Paris International Exposition, a kind of “world’s fair” that would bring thousands of people to the French capital to marvel at the architecture, sample its foods, and get a taste–not only for French culture–but for the intellectual achievements and new technology springing up around the world, ushering in a new century.
But, being hosted in Paris, the focus, of course, needed to remain on Paris; to do this, the French government announced a design competition for a monument to be built in the central part of the city. The competition, according to the official Eiffel Tower website, was to “study the possibility of erecting an iron tower on the Champ-de-Mars with a square base, 125 meters across and 300 meters tall” to serve as the fair’s entrance.
One hundred and seven different project ideas were submitted, but ultimately the commission was granted to Eiffel et Compagnie, a consulting and construction firm owned by the acclaimed bridge builder, architect and metals expert Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, who had recently designed the framework of the newly erected Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.
While Eiffel himself often receives full credit for the monument that bears his name, it was his employees who actually came up and fine-tuned the concept—a structural engineers Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier as well as architect Stephen Sauvestre.
Koechlin and Nouguier proposed “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.” Eiffel reportedly rejected Koechlin’s original plan for the tower, instructing him to add more ornate flourishes. So Sauvestre suggested “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.” This design was later determined to be too ornate. Eventually, a simplified but still elaborate open-lattice wrought-iron tower that would reach nearly 1,000 feet above Paris, a height previously believed to be almost unattainable, and be the world’s tallest man-made structure was designed. This was thanks to a patent filed by Eiffel back in 1884, which outlined “a new configuration allowing the construction of metal supports and pylons capable of exceeding a height of 300 meters.” As Eiffel explained, the curvature of the uprights was mathematically determined to offer the most efficient wind resistance possible: “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.”
Despite this, many critics immediately objected to the design and the project itself, claiming the structure would be unsafe, unsound, and an eye sore in their beautiful city. Protest pieces were written in many newspapers, with satirists using words such as “belfry skeleton, “mast of iron gymnasium apparatus, incomplete, confused and deformed” and “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.” (The title of this article comes from another not-so-happy Paris citizen).
Irregardless, ground broke on what would soon be called the “Eiffel Tower” on January 26, 1887. According to official figures from the Eiffel Tower website, the project took 18,038 metallic parts, 5,300 workshop designs, 50 engineers and designers, 150 workers in the Levallois-Perret factory, between 150 and 300 workers on the construction site (with, remarkably, only 1 death, an impressive number back before workplace safety rules and regulations), 2,500,000 rivets, 7,300 tons of iron, 60 tons of paint, and 5 lifts. All in all, the duration of work lasted 2 years, 2 months and 5 days, reaching conclusion at the end of March 1889.
Criticism of the tower quickly wore out upon its completion. An estimated two million people visited it during the 1889 World’s Fair alone. Although the tower was originally planned only to stand for twenty years, its height found further uses in the early 20th century as a hub for wireless messages, particularly in wartime, and a house for scientific research such as astronomy, meteorology, aerodynamics, physiology, and even wind speed tests conducted at the base.
Nowadays, its hard to imagine Paris without its iconic statue, whose construction began on this day 137 years ago.
