The ingénieurs civils, the graduates of the École Centrale, were the engineers of private enterprise and closer to American engineers in spirit. Gustave Eiffel was an outstanding example; another was William Le Baron Jenney, a Chicago architect and engineer, who was to build the world’s first skyscraper. But all French engineers, and those from the Polytechnique especially, regarded themselves as men of science. Their creations were the result of abstract computation. The Americans, in the French view, were merely adroit at improvisation, which, however inspired or ingenious, was nonetheless
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