Gustave
Eiffel
Parents
Marriages
and children
Relations
Notes
Gustave Eiffel came from a emigrated Rhenish family that was well established in Paris by 1710, from the name of Boenickhausen to which he had added that of Eiffel, easier to pronounce and who (reminded his region of origin. This additional name became the only legal patronymic of the family in 1879.
(Source
http:// to vizier.u-strasbg.fr/~heck/eiffel.htm)
As
a diligent and promising student, he went to École Centrale des Arts et
Manufactures and afterwards became deeply involved in the design and building of
French railways and bridges. Eiffel worked on structures such as a bridge across
the Garonne River at Bordeaux, train stations at Toulouse and Agen, and the
Garabit Viaduct in southern France, some of which are still standing to this
very day. But some of Eiffel's most historic and most-known structures and
designs are what makes him so special, his work on la tour Eiffel (the Eiffel
tower) and la statue de liberté (the Statue of Liberty). In 1885, Gustave
Eiffel started on a project, a rather large lady called the Statue of Liberty,
that was to be given as a gift to the United States by the French people as a
sign of international friendship. Eiffel was one of the great minds behind
Liberty along with Auguste Bartholdi and Richard M. Hunt. Eiffel designed the
wrought-iron skeleton for the inside of the Statue of Liberty. He also
supervised the raising of Liberty. He calculated how much pressure would be put
on each joint and how to distribute the weight and instructed how to assemble
the various pieces of the great lady to maximize the safety and life of the
standing statue. Eiffel did all this very economically and his methods have not
been beaten to this day. Alexandre Gustave Eiffel had a unique and unheard of
understanding of math and science and used his abilities to the fullest.
After
some years spent in the Southwest of France, where he notably watches the works
of the important railroad bridge of Bordeaux, he sets up his own business in
1864 as "builder", that is as entrepreneur specialized in steel
structures.
His
builder's exceptional career is marked out in 1876 by the viaduct of Port on
Douro, then that of Garabit in 1884, as well as by the station of Pest in
Hungary, the dome of the look-out post of Nice and the cunning structure of the
Statue of the Freedom, before peaking in 1889 with the Eiffel Tower.
In
his lifetime and through the Statue of Liberty, he prepared the world for modern
skyscrapers and structures. Eiffel is best known for the brilliant structure
that shows off the most of his talent and genius, the grand Eiffel tower, a
symbol of love, romance, and intellectual engineering French-style. The Eiffel
Tower was built to commemorate the 100th-anniversary of the French Revolution at
the Centennial Exposition of 1889. Approximately 700 proposals were sent in for
the design competition and among the hundreds of designs, Gustave Eiffel's was
unanimously chosen. Construction of the great tower started on July 1, 1887.
Eiffel organized his workers' schedules to perfection and the extremely careful
design and construction of the tower needed no corrections. Alexandre Gustave
Eiffel again showed his remarkable ability in mathematics and science in the
Eiffel Tower. He calculated the distance between the 2,500,000 rivets in the
tower to one-tenth of a millimeter, the wind pressures at all heights so that
the tower could withstand them, and the curve of the base pylons so that the
pulling and pushing of the wind was transformed into forces of compression so
the wind would not affect the base. These methods inspired the architects and
engineers of contemporary super skyscrapers such as the World Trade Center.
In
France, while the project of a World Fair is definitively adopted in 1883, two
engineers of the company Eiffel, Émile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin, have then
the idea of a metal tower. Their sketch, shaped on June 6th, 1884, embellishes
with the cooperation of Stephen Sauvestre, the architect of the company Eiffel,
who refines and decorates the building.
At
first reluctant, Gustave Eiffel appropriates the idea of his co-workers by
buying back the patent put down on September 18th, 1884. It is now a question
for him of making it credible with the eyes of the public opinion. The
entrepreneur displays all his energy and his advertising talent; he also turns
to good account his relations in the political environment. Gustave Eiffel
notably acts with Edouard Locroy, Minister of Trade and general police
superintendent of the Exhibition... His project is a prize-winner of a
competition launched on May 1st, 1886. An agreement is then signed on January
8th of the next year between the engineer and the Government. This one finalizes
the financing of the construction of the building and decides on its future
place, at the edge of the Seine and in the axis of the bridge of Iéna, in other
words in the center of the capital.
January
28th, 1887, works can thus begin. After the digging of the foundations, the
Parisians attend the spectacle of the rise of the building. This one progresses
very quickly, at the rate of twelve meters a month. Only the assembly of the
elements of the Tower is done on the site. The elements of the Tower are drawn
and made in the studios “Eiffel”, near Paris. The entrepreneur, who
personally watches the promotion of the works, however has to face some loud
strikes of the workers at the construction site. Indeed, their very particular
conditions of employment do not justify salaries in the measure of the incurred
risks?
The
Eiffel Tower is finally inaugurated on March 31st, 1889. Gustave Eiffel, who
respected the delays which were granted to him, receives the Legion of Honour.
From next May 15th, the ascent of the monument is opened to the public. And up
to the close of the World Fair, on the next November 6th, the Eiffel Tower
welcomes two million guests. It is an immense success, in the measure of the
controversies aroused by the project and its realization. After the end of its
entrepreneur's career marked by the failure of the Panama Canal, Eiffel is going
to pursue an active life, occupied by experimental scientific researches on the
meteorology, the radiotelegraphy and the aerodynamics.
The
Eiffel Tower, upon completion on March 31, 1889, was so perfect that the
Scientific American of June 15, 1889, published that it was, "without
error, without accident, and without delay." The Prince of Wales, who later
would become King Edward VII of England in 1889, opened Eiffel’s magnificent
tower. The Eiffel Tower was then the tallest structure in the world at 984 feet
(300 meters). It brought mixed feelings toward it. Some people were angry and
cried out, "(We) protest with all our force, with all our indignation, in
the name of unappreciated French taste, in the name of menaced French art and
history, against the erection, in the very heart of our capitol, of the useless
and monstrous Eiffel Tower. . . . Is Paris going to be associated with the
grotesque, mercantile imaginings of a constructor of machines?" Others were
proud that their country owned the tallest building in the world and still
others were shocked and amazed at the height and power of the tower. In spite of
these various emotions, Eiffel thought that his tower was a beautiful
masterpiece. Later in his life, Gustave Eiffel added a meteorological station, a
military telegraph, and an aerodynamics laboratory. He feared that his precious
tower would lose money and be disassembled after the Paris World's Fair of 1889
closed down. Though it was not expected to, the Eiffel Tower actually paid for
itself with the visitors' fees it collected. To make all his hard and involved
work worthwhile, Eiffel was given the Legion of Honneur, an outstanding
achievement. Gustave Eiffel has a huge reputation as an excellent architect of
bridges, viaducts, and the Eiffel Tower. He helped and advised the designing and
the construction of the Statue of Liberty and the church of Notre Dame Des
Champs. Though rejected in his time, he was also the first person to think of
putting a tunnel under the English Channel and an underground rail system
underneath Paris. Alexandre Gustave Eiffel died on December 27, 1923 in his
mansion on Rue Rabelais in Paris. He will always be remembered as an influential
man of modern architects and a great mind of math, science, engineering, and
architecture in history.
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