For Eliza and Isabella.
We’ll always have Paris—DA
GROSSET & DUNLAP
Penguin Young Readers Group
An Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Text copyright © 2017 by Dina Anastasio. Illustrations copyright © 2017 by Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Published by Grosset & Dunlap, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. The WHO HQ™ colophon and GROSSET & DUNLAP are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Printed in the USA.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 9780451533845 (paperback)
ISBN 9780451533869 (library binding)
ISBN 9780451533852 (ebook)
Version_2
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Where Is the Eiffel Tower?
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Timeline of the Eiffel Tower
Timeline of the World
Bibliography
Where Is the Eiffel Tower?
On March 31, 1889, Gustave Eiffel climbed 1,710 steps to the top of his new tower. He attached the striped blue, white, and red French flag to the flagpole. The flag fluttered in the wind. He looked down. The entire city of Paris, France, spread out 934 feet below him. He watched the boats moving back and forth along the Seine River that flows through the center of the city.
Across the river, on the right bank, people were strolling along the wide boulevard toward the limestone Arc de Triomphe monument. Others were relaxing on benches in the gardens near the Louvre Museum. Farther up the river, Gustave could view Notre-Dame Cathedral, one of the city’s oldest stone buildings.
Next to his tower, on the river’s left bank, a world’s fair called the Exposition Universelle was getting ready for its May 6 opening day. Hundreds of thousands of visitors were expected. Artists and inventors would exhibit their newest creations. Merchants from all over the world would demonstrate their latest products. Gustave Eiffel’s tower would be the entrance to the fair.
Gustave walked down the stairs. At the bottom, the men who had worked on the tower were waiting. So were Paris dignitaries and reporters.
Gustave thanked all the workers. It had been two years, two months, and five days since they dug the first hole. During that time, Parisians had watched Gustave’s wrought-iron tower rise higher and higher. Now it was the tallest structure in the world.
Many critics called it a monstrosity. A giant, ugly smokestack.
On May 6, when the fair opened, the public would see—and decide—for themselves. It is doubtful that very many people at that time expected the Eiffel Tower to become one of the most famous landmarks anywhere on earth.
France
France is a country in western Europe. It is almost as big as Texas, but not quite.
The official language of France is French.
The capital is Paris.
France is part of the European Union. Its money is the euro.
The French flag has three equal-size vertical stripes. They are blue, white, and red. The flag is called the tricolore.
France is officially named the French Republic. It became a republic in 1792, after the French Revolution.
CHAPTER 1
Opening Day
The fair opened 1225-60 on a beautiful, cool spring day. An enormous crowd of people from France and other parts of the world waited.
Shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon, the French president pushed a button. Three fountains lit by electric lights spewed forth water from the ground beside the tower. The crowds cheered.
For more than two years, Parisians had seen this strange metal creation rise. They knew that its giant legs faced north, south, east, and west, like the points of a compass. They had read about the delicate lattice ironwork and other details. They had heard about the four restaurants that would serve wonderful food, and the observation deck at the very top.
Today was the day! Finally they would be able to examine the whole tower not only from the outside, but from the inside, too. They could ride the elevators all the way to the top . . .
Except the elevators weren’t working. Even worse, the stairs weren’t ready for the public. Up on the tower, workmen were still sawing and hammering. Workers were hurrying to finish painting the tower dark red. Visitors would have to wait to go inside.
The crowd was disappointed. They had been reading about the tower in newspapers. Many reporters despised it. Others praised it. A few admitted they had no idea what this iron thing was supposed to be. Many people had written letters to the editor protesting the tower. Parisians were proud of their long past. They were proud of all the magnificent old stone buildings and monuments that lined their boulevards. This tower was so different. It didn’t fit in with the rest of the city.
The 1889 Paris fair was celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. It had brought about the country’s first democratic government. Shouldn’t the fair’s entrance be a monument to France’s noble history?
But others disagreed. The fair was also supposed to show off everything new in art and science. Countries from all over the world were exhibiting their latest products. Shouldn’t the entrance to the fair celebrate the new instead of the old? Shouldn’t visitors enter the fair through something exciting and modern?
The crowd moved past the tower. Inside the fairground, there was so much to see. People went from one pavilion to another, either on foot or by tram or rickshaw. They watched Turkish men making shoes. They saw jewelry being made in the Tunisian pavilion. They ate North African couscous and listened to Arab music as they sipped imported teas.
However, many pavilions along the lovely tree-lined paths were incomplete. In the Palace of Fine Arts building, French and American paintings had yet to be hung. Mosaics, tapestries, glasswork, and sculptures from countries around the world were still being unpacked.
Gallery of Machines
Many visitors had been hoping to see the beautiful fifteen-acre Gallery of Machines. They had heard that the newest inventions and gadgets would be on exhibit. But again, fairgoers were disappointed. Most exhibits would not be ready for at least another week.
Happily, that wasn’t the case with Thomas Edison’s latest invention. Edison was famous worldwide. His new electric lightbulbs glowed around the fair and shimmered in the fountains. Now visitors could examine his latest wonder—the phonograph. It could record sounds and music and play them on round wax cylinders. The phonograph was the talk of the fair.
Until then, to hear music you had to be where it was being performed. People went to concerts or played musical instruments at
home. For the first time, they could listen to music and words coming from a machine. And they could try out another new idea: earphones. The idea came from watching doctors listen to the beating of human hearts. Doctors had been using in-ear listening devices attached to stethoscopes for forty years. Now they could be used to listen to music.
A machine that records sound? people asked as they waited in line. A machine that plays music? A machine that speaks? Truly the future had arrived!
As day turned to night, the fair glowed. Edison’s electric lights meant it could stay open past dark. Earlier fairs had closed at sundown.
Later that night, as the first day of the fair came to a close, fireworks lit up the sky.
At 10:00 p.m., the dark red Eiffel Tower lit up. Green Roman candles exploded near the top. It was a glorious end to the day.
Inside the tower, however, Gustave Eiffel was filled with despair. He was fifty-six years old. To many who knew him, it seemed that he had been preparing for this moment most of his life. He had tried his best to have the tower ready before the fair opened, but he had failed. Visitors would have to wait nine more days to explore it.
Thank You, Mr. Edison
Thomas Alva Edison wanted to figure out how to record people talking. Before long, he came up with a cylinder wrapped in tinfoil that spun around and made high and low sounds when poked by a needle, called a stylus. He also thought of using round, grooved discs made of wax. His disc inventions, later called records, are still played on turntables today.
In 1891 he invented the first motion-picture camera and viewing apparatus, the Kinetoscope.
So thank you, Mr. Edison.
CHAPTER 2
Gustave Eiffel
Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel was born in Dijon, France, on December 15, 1832. Gustave was close to both of his parents. His father, Alexandre, was an artist, a reader, a thinker, and a dreamer.
His mother, Catherine, was much more practical. She was good at making plans, meeting deadlines, and handling money.
When Gustave was young, his parents ran a thriving business that transported coal from mines to places around the world. Gustave and his two younger sisters spent many happy days at the canal port in Dijon. He watched carts filled with coal arrive from the mines and get transferred to ships. He loved the hustle and bustle of boats being loaded and unloaded at all hours and in all kinds of weather.
As the coal business grew, his parents spent more and more time working. Gustave went to live with his mother’s mother, who was blind. His grandmother was strict, but Gustave didn’t seem to mind that much.
What Gustave didn’t like was school. He found it boring and a waste of time compared to what was happening on the busy canal. He had a hard time keeping his mind on his work, so his grades were not good. He did just enough work to keep up.
When Gustave was twelve, he took his first trip to Paris. He had never been on a train before, and he loved every minute of it.
In Paris, he went to the theater and the ballet. Gustave was determined to return to the wonderful city as soon as he could.
Back at school, he found teachers that understood his curiosity and imagination. They introduced him to literature and history. He also embraced science. His grades soared, and he was accepted at a college on the left bank of the Seine River in Paris, not far from where his tower would rise almost forty years later.
It was at college that Gustave fell in love with metal.
Paris was changing. Architects were just beginning to use metal instead of stone. Iron bridges were being built. Gustave was curious about how metal could be used. How could he bend it? How could he shape it? What could he build? There were so many possibilities. He didn’t know all the answers yet. He would need to learn how to create iron structures.
A wrought-iron bridge under construction
Gustave enrolled in engineering school. After he graduated, he worked an unpaid job in an iron foundry owned by his brother-in-law. He watched and listened.
In 1862, when Gustave was thirty years old, he married Marie Gaudelet. In need of money, he moved on to a paid job in a company that designed railway engines. He was fascinated by curving, long-distance railway tracks.
Gustave’s life was changing. His family was growing. In time, the Eiffels would have three daughters and two sons. But work was Gustave’s passion. He never wavered in his love for metal. He opened his own company and hired engineers, architects, and designers. Together, they went on to create bridges, railway stations, churches, and other buildings all over the world. Between 1882 and 1884, he created the Garabit Viaduct, the world’s highest bridge at the time. His company became most famous, however, for creating the metal framework inside the Statue of Liberty.
The Garabit Viaduct
The Statue of Liberty
From 1879 to 1883, while the artist Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi sculpted the outside of the Statue of Liberty, Gustave Eiffel and his team worked on the inside. The statue would need a metal skeleton that would remain strong for hundreds of years. Eiffel’s intricate frame used flexible, flat pieces of lightweight iron to attach the inner iron skeleton to the outer copper skin.
The copper statue of the Roman goddess of liberty was a gift of friendship to the United States from the people of France. It would celebrate the freedom and independence Americans had won in the Revolutionary War.
On June 19, 1885, the Statue of Liberty arrived at her new home on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor.
A cross-section of the Statue of Liberty
CHAPTER 3
Mr. Eiffel’s Tower
On May 2, 1886, the French government announced a contest that excited Gustave because of what he might create out of iron.
Contestants were asked to submit a design for a tower that would be the entrance to the 1889 fair. The tower had to be three hundred meters high, which is more than nine hundred feet. That would make it the tallest structure in the world. A structure so high would show what a great country France had become in the last one hundred years. In addition, the tower must be a temporary structure that was easy to put up and take down.
Gustave wanted to enter the contest—and win!
For a long time he had been thinking about an eight-sided wooden tower in New York City. It was called the Latting Observatory. The 315-foot wooden building had been built in 1853 (it burned down three years later). It had three levels and was larger at the bottom, tapering to a point at the top. Iron braces held all the wood in place.
The Latting Observatory
Maurice Koechlin
The wooden Latting Observatory struck Gustave as plain and unexciting. But something similar using iron would be amazing. In fact, even before the fair contest was announced, Gustave had asked Maurice Koechlin, an engineer in his drawing department, and Émile Nouguier, a structural engineer, to draw plans for such a tower.
Émile Nouguier
Because of the contest, Gustave worked with his top employees, redesigning the earlier drawings. The tower would be made of metal. Thousands of pieces of wrought iron would be used to create a perfect design. He would need rivets to hold them together. Building the tower would be like working on a huge, well-planned, perfectly designed LEGO creation.
But Gustave wanted his tower to be more than a perfectly engineered structure. His new tower would be a work of art. A modern masterpiece.
Stephen Sauvestre was Eiffel’s top architect. He was also a brilliant artist. He understood Gustave’s dream. Working together, the two men would create a building to be admired throughout time. Sauvestre imagined a graceful tower filled with beautiful details. His design featured swooping arches. Carved stonework would decorate the tower’s legs. He suggested artistic trimmings and elegant decorations.
Stephen Sauvestre
The
judges agreed that the plan was exactly what they were looking for. Eiffel won the contest. On January 8, 1887, they signed a contract. Everyone in Gustave’s company was excited.
Eiffel and his team of engineers had less than two and a half years to build the tower. They weren’t worried. They had built many bridges from wrought iron. They knew how to create structures quickly and safely, ones that could withstand violent storms and allow for huge crowds.
Twenty years earlier, Eiffel had set up workshops in Levallois-Perret, a northwest suburb of Paris. It was in those buildings that most of the work on the Eiffel Tower took place.
Each piece of iron was cut, measured, numbered, and prepared to connect to the next piece. Rivet holes were drilled in each piece and precisely measured so that they would line up perfectly. Temporary pegs were used to connect the pieces. Later, when all the pieces were connected at the fairground by the river, the pegs would be replaced by strong, permanent bolts.
As the iron pieces were being cut and fitted together in the workshop, workmen were digging holes in the soil on the Champ de Mars, a large grassy park near the Seine River.
The tower’s four iron legs had to be planted deep in the ground. They also had to angle inward to the first platform. The sloping legs would hold the tower steady, even in the strongest winds.
However, the workmen soon realized that the clay soil nearest the river created a problem. It was too wet. The two legs by the river might sink. Eiffel needed to find a way to make sure all four legs stood at the same level. He decided to dig the two holes in damp soil sixteen feet deeper than the other two and pour in compressed air and extra concrete. Now the four holes were all equally deep. They were filled with cement, limestone blocks, and gravel. Iron anchors and bolts were inserted, and each iron leg was attached to a concrete column.
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