by Jill Jonnes
The Parisian architects had been the first to strike, outraged that a mere engineer and builder of railway bridges could imagine his iron monstrosity worthy of a central place in their illustrious city. In early February of 1885, Jules Bourdais, architect of the acclaimed Trocadéro Palace, had begun promoting his plan: a one-thousand-foot-tall Sun Column, a classical granite tower of elegant loggias enclosing a hollow center. Rising up from a proposed six-story museum of electricity, the Bourdais Column would be topped not only by a gigantic searchlight (combined with parabolic mirrors) that would illumine the city, but by a statue of Scientia, or Knowledge. When questioned, Bourdais declined to consider that his design was an engineering impossibility, far too heavy for its foundation, and unlikely to survive strong winds. Instead, he challenged Eiffel to show how elevators could go up and down inside his tower’s curved legs. Now that, Bourdais countered, was the real impossibility!
For a year the architects quietly attacked Eiffel behind the scenes, certain they could persuade the government to choose Bourdais’s Sun Column. But the fair’s commissioner Lockroy, also the minister of trade in the republican administration, was clearly enamored of Eiffel’s tower, and Lockroy—a swashbuckling classicist and freethinker, a veteran of Garibaldi’s anti-royalist campaign in Sicily, and a man who relished drama—was not easily swayed. He was firmly committed to seeing built a “monument unique in the world . . . one of the most interesting curiosities of the capital.” And so, on May 1, 1886, Paul Planat, founder and editor of the architectural journal La construction moderne, went noisily public, launching the first of many jeremiads against Eiffel’s tower, denouncing it as “an inartistic . . . scaffolding of crossbars and angled iron” and excoriating above all its “hideously unfinished” look.
In truth, no project had yet been officially selected, and the very next day Lockroy formally invited all who wished to compete for the great honor of constructing the World’s Fair tower to submit proposals by May 18, 1886. Though Lockroy suggested that the design be for an iron tower of 300 meters, many among the 107 entrants ignored that guideline. One entrant envisioned a gigantic water sprinkler, in case drought struck Paris. Another featured a tall tower built not of iron but of wood and brick. Perhaps the most historically minded design was the gigantic guillotine, so evocative of the very event being unofficially celebrated, the fall of the Bastille. Was it possible, Planat wondered in print, even as the winner was to be announced, that Monsieur Lockroy, reputedly “a man of taste,” might still acknowledge the error of his ways and realize that “there could be no honor in erecting [Eiffel’s] monstrosity . . . [or] leaving as his legacy this scaffolding”?
Gustave Eiffel
By now, others had joined the campaign against Eiffel, asserting that the actual construction of a safe one-thousand-foot tower was technically impossible, as no building that tall could resist the power of the wind. Moreover, how would Eiffel find men willing or even able to work at such vertiginous heights? And what of the danger to those who would come as visitors to ascend such a structure? Of course, Eiffel knew that these naysayers probably understood nothing of his vast experience, the more than fifty wrought-iron railroad bridges he had built in France alone. Erecting those structures had made him thoroughly confident that his mathematical formula for shaping wrought iron would hold up to the worst possible winds. As for the labor question, his workers who had built the bridge at Garabit were already habituated to working four hundred feet above the ground. And once the tower was up, he had no doubt it would be perfectly safe. He did not bother to dignify with a reply the strange assertion that such a huge iron tower would become a dangerous magnet, drawing the nails from surrounding Parisian buildings.
Then came an entirely new line of attack, slithering out of that most poisonous undercurrent of French life: anti-Semitism. In June a hateful screed titled The Jewish Question charged that Eiffel, through his German ancestors, was “nothing more nor less than a German Jew.” An entire chapter scourged “L’Exposition des Juifs” and denounced the proposed Eiffel Tower as “une tour juive.” It was a sad commentary that Eiffel even felt obliged to respond, as he did in the republican paper Le Temps, stating, “I am neither Jewish nor German. I was born in France in Dijon of French Catholic parents.”
Gustave Eiffel was very much a child of the bourgeoisie who’d spent his boyhood in Dijon expecting to run his rich uncle’s vinegar and paint factory. But while Eiffel was finishing his education in Paris, dabbling in la vie bohème as a college student, a dandy who loved to dance, fence, and flirt, his ferociously republican uncle (“all kings are rogues”) quarreled so violently with his sister and Bonapartist brother-in-law that relations were severed. Young Eiffel, trained in chemistry, floundered briefly before finding employment in the burgeoning new industrial field of railway engineering. The young man so impressed his employers that by age twenty-six he was entrusted with a huge and complicated project: building the first iron railroad bridge across the Garonne River in Bordeaux.
Gustave Eiffel had found his métier. He loved designing and erecting gigantic practical structures that conquered nature, he excelled at both the mathematics and the logistics of building, and he enjoyed working out in the weather with his men. His technical schooling and early training as an engineer had instilled a necessary discipline and rigor, and his brilliance and entrepreneurial spirit distinguished him even at this young age. Moreover, Eiffel also possessed an attractive boldness, impetuosity, and natural courage. When one of his bridge riveters fell into the river, Eiffel, a strong swimmer, plunged right in to rescue the man from drowning. When they were both safe, he said calmly, “Please be good enough to attach yourselves carefully in the future.” Not long after, Eiffel saved yet another man and his three children from drowning when their boat capsized, this time in a raging storm.
In January 1860 Eiffel informed his mother and father that he intended to marry a young Bordelaise woman of some standing, a Mademoiselle Louise whose wealthy family owned a château and vineyards. When her widowed mother dismissed him as a mere fortune hunter whose antecedents were not of proper standing, he was humiliated. The parents of three other well-off young women proved equally unimpressed by Eiffel’s considerable accomplishments and glowing prospects. Finally, about to turn thirty, his pride badly bruised, Eiffel sat down and wrote to his mother, asking her to locate a bride among the more provincial young ladies of Dijon. “I would be satisfied with a girl with an average dowry,” he wrote, “a face that is kind, someone who is even-tempered and has simple tastes. Really, what I need is a good housekeeper who won’t get on my nerves too much, who will be as faithful as possible, and who will give me fine children.” On July 8, 1862, Eiffel married Marguerite Gaudelet, seventeen, whom he had known since childhood. Theirs proved to be a happy union, blessed over the years with five children.
Even as Eiffel was relishing his first year of married life, he made the unhappy discovery that his sister Marie’s husband, Armand, a manager in the same firm as Eiffel, was an embezzler. Long the family’s black sheep, Armand was banished to America, leaving behind Marie, who took up lace making to assuage her humiliation. Close on the heels of this family disgrace, Eiffel’s youngest sister, Laure, was diagnosed with a throat tumor. During one of his frequent visits to her sickbed, Eiffel wrote his elderly parents, “Just in two or three days, the illness has gotten so much worse. . . . It is terrible to see.” On August 11, 1864, Eiffel telegraphed his father: “Our poor Laure died this morning at 4 a.m. Come as soon as possible. I leave it to you to tell poor mother.” Eiffel named his second daughter Laure in his sister’s memory.
By 1867, with financial backing from his family, Gustave Eiffel had established his own firm in a Parisian suburb and immediately won an all-important contract to design and build the iron-and-glass Palais des Machines at that year’s Paris World’s Fair. Over the next decade, he would come to specialize in railroad bridges and viaducts—forty-two in France alone. Using his own mathematical fo
rmulas for the elasticity of wrought iron, he designed and erected strong wind-resistant structures of notable elegance, which became his industrial signature. In 1876 his parabolic railway bridge across the Douro River Gorge in Oporto, Portugal, was hailed as an aesthetic masterpiece of engineering ingenuity.
And so, by his forties, Gustave Eiffel was gaining renown and wealth, while his firm was increasingly engaged in far-flung locales outside France. At home he was a doting paterfamilias, his wife and children happily ensconced in a mansion on rue de Prony, just blocks from the beautiful Parc Monceau. His wife’s frail health always worried him, and in mid-1877 she became seriously ill. Despairing, he wrote his parents: “Marguerite is suffering from a chest ailment that leaves no hope.” In early September she awoke vomiting blood, collapsed, and died at the age of thirty-two. From this time on, Eiffel’s oldest child, Claire, fourteen, took charge of the household. Eiffel would not remarry, and in February of 1885, when Claire wed Adolphe Salles, a tall bespectacled mining engineer, the new couple made their home with him. While Eiffel’s daughters were lovely girls who made their papa proud, his two grown sons were more problematic, prone to embarrassing and sometimes expensive escapades. And so it was not Eiffel’s sons who joined him at his thriving firm, but his new son-in-law, Monsieur Salles.
On June 12, 1886, the two men were delighted to learn they had won the coveted commission to build the fair’s centerpiece. Despite the campaigns of Eiffel’s opponents, Commissioner Lockroy (to no one’s surprise) had selected Eiffel’s Tour en Fer de Trois Cents Mètres, having deemed the other projects either unworkable or—in the case of the gigantic replica of a guillotine—simply impolitic. Eiffel’s tower was praised as having “a distinctive character . . . [being] an original masterpiece of work in metal.” Ultimately, Eiffel would be building a potent symbol of French modern industrial might, a towering edifice that would exalt science and technology, assert France’s superiority over its rivals (especially America), and entice millions to visit Paris for the fair to ascend the tower’s unprecedented heights. After all, American and British engineers had likewise dreamed of building a wonderfully tall tower, but they had not been able to figure out the means to do so. Eiffel, the Frenchman, through his years of erecting gigantic and beautiful arched railroad bridges, had solved the mystery, and being thoroughly Gallic, he intended to build with elegance and artistry.
During this time of attacks and controversy, an English reporter who sought out Eiffel was somewhat surprised to find that his office was located in a modest-looking town house on a quiet street, its front door marked by only a small brass plate engraved with Eiffel’s name. Once inside, however, the reporter found more of what he had been expecting: “The interior was richly furnished. . . . The entrance hall was thickly carpeted, and was gay with flowers and palms. The waiting-room was a very salon, most sumptuously furnished, the walls being hung with plans and designs of gigantic enterprises, accomplished or under consideration. Footmen in livery were in attendance. An adjoining room was Eiffel’s private office. It was soberly but richly furnished, and was similarly decorated with pictures of his triumphs over iron and steel. Eiffel’s table was at the far end of this room, a plain working-table. His son-in-law sat opposite to him. Between them on the wall were all kinds of electrical apparatus for killing time and space.”
While Gustave Eiffel always spoke persuasively on the tower’s design, its safety, and its beauty, he was noticeably touchy on the subject of its practical purpose. He repeatedly insisted that the Eiffel Tower would serve a plethora of important needs—the study of meteorology, aerodynamics, telegraphy, and even military strategy. “A program has already been drawn up by our scientific men,” he said, which would “include the study of the fall of bodies through the air, the resistance of the air to varying velocities, certain laws of elasticity, the study of the compression of gases or vapors under pressure . . . lastly, a series of physiological experiments of the deepest interest. . . . [T]here are few scientific men who do not hope at this moment to carry out, by the help of the tower, some experiment.”
After experiencing the joy of winning the commission, Eiffel entered another painful phase when he estimated the cost of erecting the tower at five million francs, or $1 million. The government, which had originally talked about underwriting that whole sum, now backpedaled, offering not quite a third, or 1.5 million francs, leaving Eiffel to raise personally the remaining millions needed to build the tower. To attract investors, he would be allowed to keep the tower up for twenty years and was assured of all profits from entry fees and restaurant concessions for the whole of that period. But after this agreement was reached, weeks and then months passed with no action and no contract. Eiffel began to worry about ever getting started with the project, much less finished.
Next, further debates arose about where best to locate the Eiffel Tower. “Was it sensible to construct the tower in the bottom of the Seine Valley? Would it not be better to place it in an elevated position, on a rise which would be a sort of pedestal for it and make it stand out more? Wouldn’t the gigantic metal tower overshadow the palaces of the Champ de Mars? Should such a permanent monument be built on the site where future exhibitions would certainly be organized?” What was the point of the tower if it did not serve as a beacon to the actual fairgrounds? And how many would pay to visit a monument located on some distant hill? In the end, Eiffel once again prevailed: His tower would stand on the Champ de Mars, with the rest of the fair.
However, when the military discovered that their training ground on the Champ de Mars would be forfeited to the Eiffel Tower not just for the duration of the fair but for twenty years, it successfully agitated to relocate the tower much closer to the river. In September Eiffel was working in his office when he learned that he now was to build his tower so close to the Seine that two of the foundations for the legs would require far more complicated compressed-air construction techniques. “These foundations,” he would later complain to Lockroy, “are far more onerous for me than those previously agreed to on the Champ de Mars.”
Summer turned to fall, with Eiffel becoming more and more distressed at the delay. Finally, on October 22, the government committee convened to debate his contract. The powerful politicians Pierre Tirard and radical leader Georges Clemenceau both railed in now familiar fashion against Eiffel’s tower, with Tirard denouncing it as “anti-artistic, contrary to French genius . . . a project more in character with America (where taste is not yet very developed) than Europe, much less France.” Clemenceau balked at building the tower simply because it was “an extraordinary thing, that would perhaps be absurd, perhaps ugly, but would attract foreigners. . . . We’re told we should give M. Eiffel 1,500,000 francs so all of England can ascend a thousand feet high above the banks of the Seine.” Of course, as Eiffel’s supporters pointed out, only their man had stepped forward with a completely original monument that he would help finance and that could be constructed in time for the exposition. But when the meeting ended, there had been no vote and thus no contract.
Once again, week after autumn week drifted by, and still there was no actual vote. The dependable gossip “Rastignac” of L’Illustration, while declaring himself surfeited with talk of Eiffel’s tower, needled Tirard and Clemenceau for being obtuse. The French people would adore the tower, he declared, for they were “wild only about the giddy, the unexpected, the gigantic and fanciful.” Nor was it just the French who hankered after the huge and amazing, he wrote; everyone wanted the incredible. For him, Eiffel’s tower was just an unfortunate sign of the times.
Finally, on November 22, the committee reconvened. While certain of its members delivered the same tirades and anti-Eiffel invective, in the end, the politicians voted 21-11 to underwrite the tower. Two days later, as Eiffel sat in his office pondering how best to extricate the contract from the state bureaucrats, events took a disastrous turn. The Comtesse de Poix, along with her neighbor, filed a lawsuit to stop construction of the tower. Both w
ere residents of the avenues abutting the Champ de Mars, and when they saw that Eiffel was about to get his contract, they went to court. “She holds that the building of the Eiffel Tower is not only a menace to her houses,” reported The New York Times, “but that it will block up for many years the most agreeable part of the Champ de Mars, and the only one in which she has been accustomed to take her daily exercise.” Many of the comtesse’s neighbors imagined this wrought-iron behemoth towering over them and felt equally nervous about living in its shadow. They worried not just about its possible collapse, but that an iron tower would function as a gigantic lightning rod, attracting dangerous storm bolts. Worst of all, this overpowering structure would not disappear when the Exposition ended, but would menace them for twenty years. Eiffel’s momentary sense of triumph evaporated; for the tower to be ready in time for the fair, he should be building it now.
Gustave Eiffel spent the cold and snowy December of 1886 in a mingled agony of frustration and indecision. It had been five months since he had won the contest, yet he still lacked the most basic building contract, much less the government subsidy. Even if he could sign a contract tomorrow, the lawsuits would prevent him from starting construction. Meanwhile, he was already expending considerable sums. At the firm’s production shops out in Levallois-Perret, Eiffel’s engineer Maurice Koechlin was supervising the production of 1,700 drawings of the skeleton of the tower, while other draftsmen worked on the 3,629 detailed renderings necessary to manufacture the 18,000 wrought-iron sections that would become the latticework tower. If construction did not start soon, all this time, effort, and money would be wasted.