Gustave Eiffel, The Eiffel Tower

0:00:06.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re at the Eiffel Tower. It is absolutely enormous. But what we wanted to do today was to try to see it through the eyes of people who first saw it.

0:00:18.9 Dr. Beth Harris: When the Eiffel Tower was built, there was nothing like it. It was the tallest structure in the world. It used iron, enabled by new technologies that made iron cheap and available.

0:00:33.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: It’s both incredibly elegant and also it looks like a machine. It is in many ways, to my eye, ugly and beautiful all at the same time.

0:00:44.8 Dr. Beth Harris: We see it as though we were seeing a skyscraper. But we can look up through the center of it. It’s this permeable monument.

0:00:53.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: Well, it’s not really architecture. It’s not skinned. It doesn’t have a wall that protects its interior. It is something that air passes through. The tallest structure that had ever been produced had only recently been finished before the Eiffel Tower, and that is the Washington Monument. But that is an almost solid masonry structure. It is piling one stone on top of another. There is enough interior space for a staircase and an elevator. And in fact, the company that designed the elevator was given a contract for the Eiffel Tower because they were the only people on earth who knew how to build an elevator that could go this high, the Otis Company.

0:01:35.4 Dr. Beth Harris: One of the criticisms that was leveled against the Eiffel Tower was that it had no purpose. It was simply a monument that marked the entrance to this 1889 World’s Exposition that was held in Paris that year.

0:01:51.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: France had a long history of hosting major world’s fairs. And then in 1889, in order to mark the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, a contest was held for a monument that would function as this gateway to this fair, which was by far the largest one that France had ever held.

0:02:10.7 Dr. Beth Harris: And these world fairs were opportunities to exhibit the national prowess in engineering, in manufacturing, in design. And so they were intensely nationalistic.

0:02:24.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: So a competition was held and one of the wealthiest men in France, an engineer, a man named Gustave Eiffel, won the competition. He had made his fortune designing and building iron structures, primarily bridges, extremely high bridges across deep gorges that had allowed him to hone his expertise, his understanding of the weight-bearing capacity of iron. Perfect preparation for building what would become the tallest structure in the world.

0:02:53.8 Dr. Beth Harris: There was all sorts of engineering calculations that had to go into ensuring that this building would stand. And of course, many people at the time thought it wouldn’t stand.

0:03:05.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: In fact, Eiffel himself had to indemnify the French state personally against lawsuits by people who lived nearby, terrified that this tower might fall.

0:03:15.1 Dr. Beth Harris: There were ideas that it would change the weather pattern in Paris and dark clouds would gather around it.

0:03:22.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: But the fiercest objections to the tower came from a group of well-established artists and architects.

0:03:28.3 Dr. Beth Harris: In fact, they wrote a letter that was published in the newspaper where they said, “For 20 years we shall see the shadow of this odious column of bolted metal stretch over the city like a black blot of ink over the most beautiful silhouette in the world. And all the more for it being without purpose, without artistic inspiration.”

0:03:51.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: This letter was signed by some of the most famous artists and architects of the day. These people spoke with enormous cultural weight.

0:04:00.1 Dr. Beth Harris: So Eiffel wrote a retort. “As for the artistic side of the question, I believe that the tower will have its own beauty…. Because we are engineers, does one think that beauty is irrelevant to us or that we do not seek in our constructions to create works that are as elegant as they are solid and durable? Are not the true conditions of strength always those of harmony?”

0:04:22.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: What Eiffel is stating is a very modernist conception. That beauty does not need to be confined to old systems. That beauty is inherent in a kind of ideal usage. It almost goes without saying that Eiffel ran into roadblock after roadblock. The French government got cold feet over and over again. And Eiffel had to put a good portion of his own personal fortune towards this monument. And as a result, he was able to strike a deal where he retained for 20 years all of the proceeds that the tower generated, even though the French state owned it. But the tower was such a tremendous success that he made his entire investment back and more.

0:05:03.5 Dr. Beth Harris: And the naysayers in many cases reversed themselves. The tower had an undeniable beauty for most people. And the thrill of riding the elevator up to the top, stopping at each of the three levels, purchasing souvenirs, going out to eat, it was a total experience. There were all of these people speaking different languages. It was this international place.

0:05:29.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: The tower did something that I think is really important. It repaired the loss of self-esteem that the French state had felt since its loss to the Prussians in a war in the 1870s. This was an expression of France’s engineering prowess, of its modernity. France was back on the world map.

0:05:48.8 Dr. Beth Harris: So for more than two years, Eiffel watches his tower rise.

0:05:52.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: One of the most difficult, and for Eiffel, one of the most nerve-wracking moments in the construction was when the four independent legs had to top out, each with four corners, so that the 16 elements had to be exactly at the same level, so that the first platform would sit on it in a perfectly even way. This required a kind of engineering brilliance and was a kind of engineering miracle.

0:06:18.2 Dr. Beth Harris: We have two and a half million rivets that hold the tower together. The holes for the rivets were pre-drilled, and each piece had to match another, so a rivet could go straight through. And so you can imagine that being off even a millimeter or two would cause the whole structure to be off-kilter.

0:06:38.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: When the tower was finally completed, Gustave Eiffel himself hoisted a flagpole. And the top of the flagpole brought the tower to 300 meters, or roughly 1,000 feet. Now, it was originally painted red. And in addition to that, there was a decorative scalloping just over the top platform that was removed in the 1930s because it looked very 19th century.

0:07:02.7 Dr. Beth Harris: And here we are, 1889. We’re in this period of French history that we call the Third Republic. France is looking back to 1789 and the establishment of the First Republic. And it’s important also, I think, to put this in the context of the period before this, the Second Empire, where Louis Napoleon is emperor, and Paris is being modernized. Sewers are being built. Running water is being provided to brand new apartment buildings. Streets are widened. Department stores are being built. This is an era of intense modernization that was inescapable for decades in the city of Paris.

0:07:44.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: So the tower is not only this lacework of iron, but it’s also this testament to a kind of absolute precision.

0:07:52.7 Dr. Beth Harris: Eiffel had on the tower, engraved in gold, the names not of French kings, not of French bishops, but of French scientists, engineers. The idea that it was knowledge that powered France’s modernization, that powered France’s greatness.

0:08:15.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: What’s remarkable is when you take the elevator up, or if you’re brave enough, the stairs, the city is laid out before you like a map. You can recognize all of the city’s great monuments: the dome of the Invalides, the dome of the Panthéon. You can see Notre Dame. You can see all of the major landmarks, landmarks that had once been the tallest structures in Paris, but that were literally dwarfed by the Eiffel Tower.

0:08:41.4 Dr. Beth Harris: Well, one of the words that was often used when describing the tower was audacity. How dare it rival Notre Dame, the Panthéon? How dare it eclipse the power of those monuments?

0:08:55.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: And what’s so interesting is that structures like Notre Dame spoke of the religiosity of the city. Buildings like the Panthéon spoke to the power of the state. But this tower, this tower speaks of the importance of engineering, of the importance of science, of the importance of the modern world.

[music]

Learn about the painting and color of the Eiffel Tower

Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” A Barthes Reader, edited by Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), pp. 236–50.

David P. Billington, The Tower and the Bridge: The New Art of Structural Engineering (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).

Jill Jonnes, Eiffel’s Tower: The Thrilling Story Behind Paris’s Beloved Monument and the Extraordinary World’s Fair That Introduced It (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2009).

Stefan Muthesius, “The ‘Iron Problem’ in the 1850s,” Architectural History, volume 13 (1970), pp. 58–131.

Ananth Ramaswamy, “Alexandre Gustave Eiffel: An engineer scientist,” Resonance, volume 14, number 9 (2009), pp. 840–48.

William Walton, Chefs-d’oeuvre de l’Exposition universelle de Paris, 1889 (Paris: Barrie Frères, c. 1889).

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