Eiffel's Tower

by Jill Jonnes

  Some complained that Eiffel’s huge metal edifice had changed the city’s climate, generating the strange lingering heat and thunderstorms. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., always obsessed with the weather, concurred, and The Herald asserted, “People who have watched the tower closely and attentively have remarked the large quantities of heavy rain and thunder-clouds which gather round it and then, as if deprived by the lightning conductors of part of their electricity, are blown farther on and break in showers in quite another part of town.”

  While the originality and sheer size of the Eiffel Tower, the continuing aesthetic controversy, and its swift progress up to the heavens all made it the center of attention, the rest of the fair buildings were advancing smartly, too. Jennie June, a writer for Godey’s Lady’s Book who was spending a month in Paris that summer, reported, “Paris is making great preparations for the great Exhibition which is to take place next year.” Dressed for the warm weather in a light cotton gown and one of the large straw hats that were all the fashion, Miss June had obtained special entry into the fairgrounds to stroll about the construction sites, and wrote, “The miles of main buildings have their great spaces already nearly all enclosed with [nine-foot panels of] pale green glass, a third of an inch in thickness . . . which give a lovely light. . . . The grounds are being laid out, turfed and planted; great trees have been transplanted, and vines already cover some of their trunks.” That instant greenery was a welcome counterpoint to the dust, noise, and heat.

  The 1889 Exposition Universelle was to be laid out in three distinct areas. The Eiffel Tower would dominate the first and most important one, the Champ de Mars on the Left Bank, and act as the grand entry arch from the Pont d’Iéna for those coming across the Seine from the Right Bank and the Trocadéro Palace (designed for the Exposition of 1878 by Gabriel Davioud). The Eiffel Tower stood at one end of the large Court of Honor park, while the under-construction Central Dome occupied the other. Flanking the court were rising twin buildings, one to hold all the painting and Fine Arts exhibits, the other to showcase the Liberal Arts. Behind the Central Dome, workers were busy erecting the gigantic Galerie des Machines. Nearby, some smaller South American pavilions of great charm were under construction, as was Baron Delart’s re-creation of a Cairo street.

  The fair’s second area, a narrow strip along the river Seine on the Quai d’Orsay intended for various agricultural pavilions, would serve to connect the Champ de Mars area with the other large part of the fair, the esplanade of the Hôtel des Invalides. Here fairgoers would find yet more agricultural exhibits, the Ministry of War pavilion, and the exotic French colonial pavilions, featuring working native villages from Senegal, the Congo, and Indochina. A special little fair railroad—the Decauville railroad—would trundle along the perimeter between the many acres of the Champ de Mars and the Esplanade des Invalides, making merely getting around not just easier but another adventure.

  Everyone had an opinion about the Eiffel Tower, and Miss June, having now seen it up close, declared herself an admirer, writing, “it will be, when completed, a marvel of beauty, harmony, grace, and proportion, considering its height and the strength necessary to sustain it. . . . The apparent size increases enormously as you approach the arch, and, looking up from the great spaces of the interior, already the workmen upon the upper sides of the building look like specks, although the building has reached only a third of its height.”

  Gustave Eiffel was pleased with the tower’s rapid progress, and by July 4, 1888, was ready to welcome and woo eighty of Paris’s most influential journalists at a summer banquet to be served on the tower’s first platform. Eiffel, in a formal frock coat suit and best silk top hat, awaited his guests at the base. Almost to a man, the writers whose words informed France on politics, science, letters, and art appeared for their fête-in-the-sky wearing similar outfits. A few sartorial upstarts wore dove-gray trousers, while the more prudent brandished furled umbrellas, prepared for the possibility of rain. They set off up the stairs amid much chattering, exclamations over the gigantic girders creating the latticework, and high spirits at being among the first to ascend the tower. Long trestle tables had been laid out for their meal, 230 feet up in the sky. High above their heads, the press could see and hear workmen riveting together the half-finished second platform. In recent weeks, the Eiffel Tower had become the tallest structure in Paris, rising above the towers of Notre Dame, at 217 feet, the Pantheon, at 260 feet, and the dome of Les Invalides, heretofore the city’s highest monument at 344 feet.

  From the first platform, the journalists gazed upon a city very different from the Paris where the Bastille had been stormed ninety-nine years earlier. From 1853 to 1870, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte III and Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann had dramatically remade the French capital, creating a modern monumental urban center arranged around new thoroughfares, squares, boulevards, theaters, and railroad stations. Haussmann’s bold vision included clearing space around public monuments, establishing elegant small public gardens, and opening up and landscaping the large parks, with all the greenery and color serving to freshen and redefine the city. As part of its makeover, Paris had been subdivided into twenty arrondissements, each with its own town hall, schools, improved sanitation, and central food market. “On the Left Bank, the boulevard Saint-Germain was opened up; on the right, the older boulevards were widened. All were planted with trees, equipped with wide asphalt pedestrian sidewalks, and lined with monumental buildings. . . . The new life generated by the Haussmannian city could be seen everywhere, all along the open streets and boulevards.” The city’s population had by now doubled, to more than two million.

  The journalists there that day savored being among the very first to see Paris from such a height, and then sat down to their festive lunch. As the meal progressed, Eiffel the proud builder arose, champagne glass in hand, and toasted his tower, saying, “The beginning was difficult, and criticism as passionate as it was premature was addressed to me. I faced the storm as best I could, thanks to the constant support of M. Lockroy . . . and I strove by the steady progress of the work to conciliate, if not the opinion of the artists, at least that of engineers and scientific men. I desired to show, in spite of my personal insignificance, that France continued to hold a foremost place in the art of iron construction.”

  He was, he declared, heartened by “the interest which [the tower] inspires, abroad as well as at home,” and hoped it would be “a triumphal arch as striking as those which earlier generations have raised to honor conquerors.” The eighty journalists present joined in the toast and, after lunch, clustered round and posed for a photograph amid the girders with their famous host. To Eiffel’s left, exuding importance, sat the Buddhaesque Francisque Sarcey, for thirty years now the nation’s most feared theater critic, absorbing this particular drama for Le Temps.

  Back in the spring, Eiffel had begun cultivating the goodwill of select journalists, starting with one of his more vociferous critics, Le Figaro’s powerful founder and editor, Albert Wolff. Hosting this journalistic éminence grise to breakfast atop the recently completed first platform had had a most salutary effect, to the degree that the Paris correspondent for The New York Times, no fan of the tower, found himself disappointed and startled to read Wolff waxing rhapsodic in Le Figaro about the Tour en Fer with phrases such as “a grandiose marvel as it rises majestically in the air,” “the audacity of its conception, the mathematical precision of its execution,” and “at once graceful and imposing, having naught in common with that tower of Babel, which, if it ever did exist, rose no higher than a fifth-story window.”

  Monsieur Wolff, with his well-honed journalist’s sense for news, had joined those who believed the Eiffel Tower would be the sensation of the fair. And shrewd editor that he was, he had quietly made a deal with Eiffel that would promote both enterprises: Le Figaro would be the envy of every other paper in Paris by having an actual (albeit tiny) editorial office and printing press on the tower’s second floor, producing a special dai
ly paper, Le Figaro de la Tour, concerned only with the doings upon the Eiffel Tower and at the fair.

  Of course, that did not stop Le Figaro from publishing mocking attacks by high-profile critics such as poet François Coppée, who in mid-July entertained the paper’s readers with thirty mean-spirited verses:

  I visited the enormous Eiffel Tower,

  That iron mast with hard rigging.

  Unfinished, confused, deformed,

  The iron monstrosity is hideous up close

  A giant, without beauty or style

  It is really a metal idol,

  Symbol of useless force

  A triumph of brute reality.

  And so it went, verse after verse, concluding with:

  And here is the great thought,

  The real goal, the profound point:

  —This ridiculous pyramid

  We will go up it for a hundred cents.

  Presumably Eiffel, though still sensitive to such slights, was too busy to brood for long. All Paris knew that if the tower was to be open ten months hence, time was of the essence. By mid-July, Eiffel’s men had completed the second platform, at a height of 387 feet. On July 14, Bastille Day, to celebrate his steady progress, Eiffel set off a fantastic fireworks display from the new apex. All around and above the tower, the night sky burst into exploding lights of many brilliant hues and shapes, all cascading down from the heavens.

  At 3:00 a.m. on June 12, 1888, back in Orange, New Jersey, Thomas Edison was in his laboratory catching up on correspondence. He had been extremely busy working out the myriad problems of perfecting his improved phonograph in order to have it ready for the Paris World’s Fair, while at the same time overseeing the building of his various electric companies. A fortnight earlier, in the midst of this most intense period of his inventing and business career, his lovely second wife, Mina, had had their first child. The baby girl, named Madeleine, was the fourth of Edison’s offspring, for he already had three adolescent children by his deceased first wife.

  Edison was writing to Col. George Gouraud, the bluff and hardy American entrepreneur who had befriended him back in 1873 when the young, struggling inventor had visited London on business. Gouraud, a decorated veteran of the Civil War now long resident in England, had first gone there to promote the Pullman Palace Car. Over the years, Gouraud had so often served as an Edison partner and promoter that he had named his West Surrey estate “Little Menlo,” after Edison’s Menlo Park Laboratory. Edison had naturally engaged Gouraud as his European partner and representative for the phonograph. Wrote Edison that morning:

  Friend Gouraud:

  This is my first mailing phonogram. It will go to you in the regular U.S. mail via North German Lloyd steamer Eider. I send you by Mr. Hamilton a new phonograph, the first one of the new model which has just left my hands.

  It has been put together very hurriedly and is not finished, as you will see. . . .

  Mrs. Edison and the baby are doing well. The baby’s articulation is quite loud enough but a trifle indistinct; it can be improved but it is not bad for a first experiment.

  With kind regards,

  Yours, EDISON

  Because Parisians were well aware that Eiffel was racing to make his deadline, they were perplexed when the month of August 1888 came and went with no visible progress beyond the second platform. Rumors started to swirl, with some saying that Eiffel had gone mad under the strain, others that he had simply given up. When those tastemakers who had been en vacances at their châteaux in the countryside or villas by the sea returned in September, they, too, were quite surprised to find the tower little taller than when they had decamped in late summer. “Rumors were afloat,” reported The New York Times, “that M. Eiffel was at a loss how to construct the remainder of his gigantic structure. . . . The difficulty seems to have been the conveyance of the material up to [the second floor], but now it is stated that everything is ready for continuing work.”

  By mid-September, the necessary cranes and winches had indeed been set up, Eiffel’s workmen were busy, and the tower was again visibly rising toward the heavens. Pay also rose, to ten cents and sixteen cents an hour. But even as the workers once again began assembling the final six hundred feet of the tower, the slender spire, they were restless and unhappy. The autumn chill presaged more bitterly cold weather, and fewer daylight working hours meant weekly pay would soon shrink. The previous winter, working outside atop the tower had been grueling. Biting winds gusted so strongly they threatened some days to send a man plunging overboard, while clinging cold fogs and debilitating hoarfrosts all exacerbated the coldness of the iron itself. “There was snow,” recalled one worker, “and the frost froze our cheeks and fingers. I can tell you it was not easy. And there was not a minute, not a minute to take it easy at this work.” Some men had complained in early 1888 to the City of Paris about their wages, denouncing Eiffel as an exploiter of labor. Now, as the days shortened and the air grew chilly, the workers’ discontent festered.

  On September 19, days after construction had recommenced, Eiffel’s men rebelled. Well aware that time, deadlines, and the unfinished tower favored their cause, the disgruntled laborers confronted Gustave Eiffel, laid out their grievances, and demanded a four-cent-an-hour pay raise. Eiffel countered with a lower offer. With that, the men descended the tower and went on strike. Eiffel, desperate to avoid any delay, bargained for the next three days, finally agreeing to a compromise whereby the men would get their four-cent raise, but one phased in over a period of four months. He would also supply the work crews with sheepskin clothing, waterproof garments for protection against the coming winter, and hot wine. Eiffel heaved a sigh of relief as he watched his crew return to work and set to, their heavy sledgehammers ringing out the familiar rhythms of pounding in rivets, hour after hour. Once again the tower began to rise, looking more graceful with each passing week.

  The Vicomte de Vogüé, a regular observer in his daily constitutional along the Seine, marveled at it all: “After the second platform, the slender column rose rapidly into space. Yet, you could not really see the construction work. The autumn fogs often hid the aerial work-place; though in the twilight of late-winter afternoons, you could see the red fires of the forges up in the sky and hear the hammers hitting the iron fittings. This was what was so striking—you almost never saw the workers on the tower; the tower appeared to grow all by itself, as if by the spell of a genie. The great works of ancient times, like the pyramids for example, are linked in our minds with the idea of great multitudes, weighing down on the levers and struggling with huge ropes; this modern pyramid was being raised up by the power of calculations requiring a very few number of hands, for today the necessary force for construction rests in a thought.”

  With Christmas approaching, and the tower nearing its halfway mark, labor trouble erupted yet again. On December 20, one of the men complained that he had worked ten hours but had been paid for only nine. A group again confronted Eiffel, agitating for further raises, citing the unprecedented heights they would be scaling and working at from here on in. Eiffel did not see the logic: “The professional risks remained the same; whether a man fell from 40 meters or 300 meters, the result was the same—certain death.” More important, he worried that if he capitulated now, it would only encourage further strikes at critical moments. “To show them that I was guided far less by financial considerations than by my wish to see the success of the work begun,” he said, “I promised that a bonus of 100 francs would be granted to all construction workers who continued working until the flag was raised.” Then he threw down the gauntlet. “All those who were not present at midday the following day would be dismissed and replaced by new workers.”

  The Eiffel Tower on December 26, 1888

  The next day, December 21, almost all his men were present and working when the midday deadline arrived. The few out on strike were fired, and those who replaced them, says Eiffel, “went up to 200 meters straight-away, and after half a day were able to perform
the same tasks as the old ones. Thus, it was proved that with the proper equipment a good construction worker can work at any height without feeling unwell.” Eiffel had no personal experience with vertigo and had never observed it among workmen on his bridges. “Were those workmen specially trained?” he asked. “Not in the least, they were for the most part simple peasants accustomed to working at great heights. . . . [O]n the tower the men will not work swinging in the air as they did on the viaducts I mentioned; they will be on a platform. . . . In every way you see these fears are chimerical.”

  Eiffel then assigned those who had not gone on strike—but who had complained about the prospect of working at ever greater heights—to install the lacy decorative arches on the first level. “Their workmates laughed at them, calling them the indispensables, and soon afterwards they left.” The work proceeded quickly, with the workmen in their sheepskins arriving in the freezing, cold dawn, ascending the icy tower, warming up at the forges, and then putting in a long, frigid day.

  As the year 1888 ended, Gustave Eiffel could doubly rejoice. First, he had resolved his labor troubles. Second, and far more exciting, the Eiffel Tower had grown to surpass in height the tallest edifice in the world, the 555-foot-tall Washington Monument, in Washington, D.C., a structure that took almost forty years to build. Completed in 1884, the American monument had suffered from an inadequate initial foundation resulting in tilting that required costly fixing. One could easily forgive Eiffel’s Gallic pride as he crowed about his triumph over “the Americans, [who] in spite of their enterprising spirit and the national enthusiasm excited by [erecting a still-taller structure than the Washington Monument], shrank from its execution.”

  The Americans, for their part, did not bother to conceal their chagrin, ungraciously mocking the monumental Eiffel Tower as “a useless structure” and comparing it unfavorably to “the Washington shaft at Washington, D.C., which is, after all, more artistic than the Eiffel Tower. . . . If [the Eiffel Tower’s] great height does not make the shaft appear too spindling and if the top has been designed with some attempt at art the result may not be so dreadful as it was supposed.” In truth, the higher the Eiffel Tower rose, the more elegant it appeared, mollifying many of its most vehement early critics. A correspondent for The New York Times conceded that the half-completed tower was a grandiose marvel but, in a bout of sour grapes, doubted whether it would be a success: “The public may go up to its summit occasionally, but having once gazed . . . said public will go where it can find things more interesting.”