by Jill Jonnes
It certainly cannot have helped Eiffel’s mood to learn that on December 18 editor Paul Planat, his most vociferous opponent, had hosted a convivial dinner where the almost one hundred architecture alumni of the venerable École des Beaux-Arts drank champagne while being entertained by numerous cruel and silly skits skewering Eiffel’s tower. Most hurtful, the much-admired architect of the magnificent Paris Opéra, Charles Garnier, had joined in, reportedly singing a long, ludicrous chanson mocking “this funnel planted on its fat butt” that dared to invade heaven. Moreover, Eiffel could look forward to seeing all this raillery in print, with biting cartoons, come the New Year.
In truth, as 1887 loomed, Eiffel had far more serious problems than the ongoing jibes, for he still had to deal with the matter of the lawsuits filed by the comtesse and her neighbor. At first, it seemed reasonable to demand a state guarantee against these legal risks, but Eiffel knew this would just present another excuse for the state to dither. Perhaps he should offer to indemnify the timorous state for all possible outcomes of the lawsuit and the possible collapse of his tower onto these ladies’ domiciles. Should he offer to raise all of the five million francs needed for construction privately? As Christmas neared, he wavered between charging boldly ahead and abandoning the project.
On December 22, 1886, Eiffel sat down and wrote his longtime supporter Édouard Lockroy a letter, explaining, “Today I must tell you once again that the delays in concluding the contract are making for a very serious situation.” He politely but unhappily enumerated all the roadblocks, including the litigious ladies and the state’s decision that they were his problem. “Meanwhile,” he pointed out, “the time is disappearing and I should have started building months ago. . . . If this situation goes on, I have to give up all hope of succeeding. . . . Still, I remain ready to start work immediately. . . . But, if I have not started work during the first part of January, I cannot possibly be finished in time. If we don’t come to a definite agreement by December 31 . . . I will find it painful but necessary to give up my responsibility and take back my proposals. I would be very sorry to renounce the construction of what most agree will be one of the Exposition’s principal attractions.” But then Eiffel changed his mind and put the letter in a drawer, deciding not to send it.
Instead, he threw all caution to the wind. He would not give Paul Planat and his other enemies the satisfaction of seeing him retreat from the field. As the New Year neared, he decided to gamble his personal fortune for the glory of seeing his one-thousand-foot tower rise over Paris. First, he agreed to indemnify the state for the Comtesse de Poix and her neighbors’ lawsuits, and any possible consequence of the tower’s collapsing, hiring top lawyers to ensure the best possible solution. He would also, as previously agreed, raise all the financing beyond the state’s 1.5 million francs. This bold stroke ended the logjam, and on January 7, 1887, he and the French and Parisian governments finally signed off on the long-stalled contract. The contract required Eiffel to use only French labor, materials, and technology and to submit to oversight by an exposition committee. At the end of the tower’s first year, the City of Paris would become its owner, but Eiffel would still retain all income, save the 10 percent earmarked for the city’s poor.
Three weeks later, on January 28, during a winter so severe that Parisians were ice-skating on lakes in the Bois de Boulogne, Eiffel broke ground at the Champ de Mars. At last, the foundations for the tower were begun. In preparation, Eiffel explained, he had made a series of borings, which “showed that the subsoil in the Champ de Mars was composed of a deep stratum of clay capable of supporting a weight of between 45 pounds and 55 pounds to the square inch, surmounted by a layer of sand and gravel of varying depth, admirably calculated to receive the foundations.” As Eiffel would confess later in a lecture, he felt tremendous “satisfaction” that morning as “I watched an army of diggers start on those great excavations that were to hold the four feet of this Tower that had been a subject of constant concern for me for more than two years.
“I also felt that, notwithstanding the severe attacks directed against the Tower, public opinion was on my side, and that a host of unknown friends were preparing to welcome this daring attempt as it rose out of the ground.”
The Eiffel Tower was situated to serve as a triumphant towering archway into the fairgrounds from the Pont d’Iéna, and each of its four gigantic feet marked one of the cardinal points of the compass. The east and south feet would stand firmly on deeply excavated gray plastic clay soil undergirded by a solid foundation of chalk. The north and west feet, being closer to the river, presented a more complex situation, requiring compressed-air excavation via sunken caissons. Every morning, through the snows and freezing weather of that harsh winter, great teams of laborers turned out to excavate the four gigantic foundations, with the blue-suited workmen tossing the dirt and rocky debris into large-wheeled wooden wagons to be carted away by horses.
As Eiffel and his work crews got busy, and the tower began to look like a reality, the influential L’Illustration continued to mock it as little better than “a lighthouse, a nail, a chandelier . . . it would never have been allowed but for politicians who have the idea it’s a ‘symbol of industrial civilization. ’ ” Horrified at the scale of what they saw taking place, the tower’s enemies mobilized for a last-ditch effort to stop the hated “scaffolding.” On February 14, not three weeks into the digging of the foundations, forty-seven of France’s most famous and powerful artists and intellectuals signed their names to an angry protest letter addressed to Paris official Adolphe Alphand, Baron Haussmann’s right-hand man and principal organizer of this and the past two World Fairs. The letter, published in Le Temps, vehemently lamented the soulless vulgarity of such an industrial behemoth, this “dizzily ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a black and gigantic factory chimney, crushing [all] beneath its barbarous mass.”
Among the signatories were France’s most hallowed names—the greatest painters of the age, Ernest Meissonier and Adolphe William Bouguereau; the celebrated writers Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas fils; poet François Coppée; composer Charles Gounod; architect Charles Garnier; and dozens of other important Parisians—with all insisting fervently: “For the Eiffel Tower, which even commercial America would not have, is without a doubt the dishonor of Paris. Everyone feels it, everyone says it, everyone is profoundly saddened by it, and we are only a weak echo of public opinion so legitimately alarmed. When foreigners visit our Exposition they will cry out in astonishment, ‘Is it this horror that the French have created to give us an idea of their vaunted taste? . . . And for the next twenty years we will see cast over the entire city, still trembling with the genius of so many centuries, cast like a spot of ink, the odious shadow of the odious column of bolted metal.”
Lockroy and Eiffel had suffered through so many anti-tower attacks that this latest rarified blast served only as a high-profile opportunity to take the offensive. Interviewed at his giant noisy workshop in the suburb of Levallois-Perret, Eiffel sounded positively sanguine in his creation’s defense: “I believe that the tower will have its own beauty. The first principle of architectural beauty is that the essential lines of a construction be determined by a perfect appropriateness to its use. What was the main obstacle I had to overcome in designing the tower? Its resistance to wind. And I submit that the curves of its four piers as produced by our calculations, rising from an enormous base and narrowing toward the top, will give a great impression of strength and beauty.”
Eiffel instructed those clinging to the past that there was ample patriotic glory in the “tallest edifice ever raised by man . . . there is an attraction and a charm inherent in the colossal. . . . It seems to me that this Eiffel Tower is worthy of being treated with respect, if only because it will show that we are not simply an amusing people, but also the country of engineers and builders who are called upon all over the world to construct bridges, viaducts, train stations and the great monuments of modern industry.”
With his tower finally launched, and the work site busy with daily progress, Eiffel could even afford to be merely amused for the readers of Le Temps at the artistic establishment’s attack: “They begin by declaring that my tower is not French. It is big enough and clumsy enough for the English or Americans, but it is not our style, they say. We are occupied more with little artistic bibelots. . . . Why should we not show the world what we can do in the way of great engineering projects. . . . Paris is to have the greatest tower in the world, after all. . . . In fact, the tower will be the chief attraction of the Exhibition.”
Lockroy, having married into the family of Victor Hugo, was well acquainted with the politics of art and literature. He, too, was fed up with Eiffel’s effete critics and lambasted their after-the-fact screed, wondering if such a protest “may be used as a pretext by some nations not to take part in our celebration.” Lockroy nominated the artists’ letter itself as an exhibit suitable for “a showcase at the Exposition. Such beautiful and noble prose cannot but interest the crowds, and perhaps even amaze them.” The authorities, however, were not interested in any further diatribes, as they had an exhibition to build.
Day by day that winter the Eiffel Tower’s foundation holes grew deeper and broader. Ultimately, “each pier would rest on a massive pile of cement and stone,” wrote Eiffel Tower historian Joseph Harriss, “set obliquely in the earth so that the curving columns that bore the weight of the tower would exert their thrust at right angles to the mass. Into each excavation was poured a bed of quick-setting cement twenty feet deep to serve as a nonsettling base for the masonry. Over the cement, Eiffel placed enormous blocks of limestone quarried at Souppes-sur-Loing, in central France, an area known for its solid travertine hard-cut stone from Château Landon, the quarry that had provided the stone for the Arc de Triomphe and the Sacré-Coeur basilica. Embedded in the center of each mass were two great anchor bolts twenty-six feet long and four inches in diameter, to which a cylindrical flanged iron shoe was attached; the column would be bolted to the shoe and thus locked into the heart of the stone mass.”
On the fifth of May, Gaston Tissandier, founder and editor of La Nature, came to visit Eiffel’s busy work site on the Left Bank of the Seine. On the river, barges drifted by, and laundry drying on the decks and small children were kept from falling overboard by leash-like ropes. Tissandier, whose frizzy beard was carefully coaxed into two separate points, had been a pioneering aerialist. In 1875 he and two companions had broken ascension records, reaching 28,215 feet in a balloon. He had been lucky, for he only lost his hearing from the lack of oxygen, while his fellow balloonists had both died. On this spring day, Tissandier was heading in the opposite direction, down below the surface of the earth in one of Eiffel’s caissons, where the men were excavating a foundation in the less stable soil by the Seine. “The descent is a strange experience for the uninitiated,” wrote Tissandier. “When the chamber is entered, the door is closed, and the air is compressed, producing to the visitor a peculiar sensation on the drum of his ear which a simple act of swallowing at once removes. The trap-door leading to the subterranean caisson is then opened, and the descent is made by the iron ladder. . . . In the caisson the men are at work digging away by the electric light, and filling and sending buckets aloft. The loaded caisson gradually sinks as the earth is cut away inside it, and when it is down to the required depth, it is filled with concrete, and forms an enormous mass of immovable solidity.”
The Eiffel Tower foundation on April 17, 1887
Convinced of the historic importance of his tower, Eiffel had engaged the renowned architectural photographer Édouard Durandelle to document its construction. In early April of 1887, Durandelle had arrived for the first time at the dusty work site and set up his bulky camera apparatus to capture the sight of the four foundations emerging from the Champ de Mars. Initially he returned every few days, but he was by no means the only photographer documenting the evolving tower. The fair commissioners had engaged Pierre Petit to follow the building of not just the tower but also the many exposition halls and palaces.
By late June the heavy masonry foundations for the Eiffel Tower’s four box piers, or legs, were completed. They included at their tops an incredibly ingenious system of sixteen hydraulic jacks, one to underlie each corner of the four piers that would soon rise. “By means of these,” wrote Eiffel, “each pier can be displaced and raised as much as is necessary by inserting steel wedges beneath it.” These would be all-important in allowing Eiffel to fine-tune the level of the first platform, which had to be absolutely level, or the whole rest of the tower would not rise straight up.
On July 1 the wrought-iron legs themselves began to take shape, four gigantic, awkward structures whose inward slant at an angle of fifty-four degrees made them look ready to keel over. Durandelle set up his camera so that the Trocadéro was framed by the legs, and returned every few weeks to capture on film the tower’s rapid upward progress. Among the crowds of the curious frequenting the tower’s construction site was the writer Eugène-Melchior, Vicomte de Vogüé, onetime diplomat assigned to Constantinople, Syria, and the court of the czar. In the last posting, this scholar of Russian had met and married his wife. De Vogüé, handsome and distingué, passed by the tower almost daily in his walks, for he found these fast-rising hulking structures most evocative: “Soon the elephant’s four megalithic feet weighed down upon the ground; the principal members sprang forward as cantilevers from the stone shoes, overturning all our ideas about the stability of a construction.”
As the gawkers gathered to stare, horse-drawn carriages arrived from Eiffel’s workshops three miles away, carrying the precisely designed and numbered sections of girders and trusses. These partially assembled wrought-iron pieces were then lifted by a traveling crane, which transported them to the four workshops at the base of each giant foot. Construction crews at each site used derricks and winches to hoist and then bolt together first the main frames, then the latticework and cross girders. Once Eiffel and his construction managers had determined that the bolted-together feet of the tower were exactly right, twenty gangs of riveters went to work removing the temporary bolts and replacing them with fiery hot permanent rivets. And so the gigantic three-dimensional puzzle began to take shape.
Each morning at dawn, with the sky just turning pink behind the city’s famous domes, Eiffel’s workers arrived dressed in coarse blue serge work clothes and wearing heavy wooden clogs. Every man knew his task, and one visitor watched in admiration as the “250 workmen came and went in a perfectly orderly way, carrying long beams on their shoulders, climbing up and down through the latticed ironwork with surprising agility. The rapid blows of the riveters could be heard, and they worked with fire that burned with the clear trembling flame of the will-o’-the-wisps.” As the day wore on, the crowds of sightseers grew, curious to see how the tower and fair were progressing.
The very preparation of the wrought-iron pieces used in the daily assembly was a complex enterprise. Every piece had to be designed separately, taking into account the variable inclination of columns and braces along every foot of the tower’s height. “The position of each,” explained The Atlantic Monthly, “and the places for its rivets [each hole calculated to within one tenth of a millimeter], had to be decided without error. In the iron plates were drilled 7,000,000 holes, which if placed end to end would form a tube 43 miles long. There were five hundred engineers’ designs, and twenty-five hundred leaves of working drawings. It was necessary to employ forty designers and calculators, for a period of about two years. It is thus seen that the iron forms a vast complicated network. . . . The large halls at Levallois-Perret had almost the appearance of a government administration.”
The three-ton wrought-iron sections were delivered to the site at a steady pace, and once the legs had become too high to be assembled any longer using the derricks and winches, Eiffel designed tall, steam-powered pivoting cranes that could travel up and down the framework hoisting sections for installati
on. All who visited the Champ de Mars came away dazzled. “When we approach it,” wrote one visitor, “the construction becomes monumental; and when we reach the floor of the colossus, we are lost in wonder at the enormous mass of metal which has been combined with mathematical precision and forms one of the boldest works that the art of engineering ever dared to attempt.” The amazement was fitting, for Eiffel’s Tower was truly sui generis, a structure like no other. And despite Eiffel’s cool certainty that the design of his tower was feasible and completely safe, “there was virtually no experience in structural history from which Eiffel could draw other than a series of high piers that his own firm had designed earlier for railway bridges.”
It was as the Eiffel Tower began to take form in the summer of 1887 that James Gordon Bennett began musing about opening a newspaper in Paris. Late at night on the balcony of his Paris apartment, the occasional fiacre passing on the gaslit Champs-Élysées, Bennett had been mulling over the matter when he heard an owl hooting. He took this as a good omen, a signal to proceed, for among his many eccentricities was his utter devotion to the owl, a lucky symbol he viewed as uniquely his.
James Gordon Bennett, Jr.