Who can imagine Paris today without it? It is one of the world's most popular monuments. As much a symbol of France is the Marseillaise or the Tricolore flag, La Tour Eiffel, the Eiffel Tower, is a national treasure.
Photographed from every angle, replicated millions of times. However, its creation was anything but straightforward. In fact, it was a mad dream to outdo anything already built.
It was twice as high as the next-highest monument in the world at that time. The dream was that of a man named Eiffel. Gustave Eiffel.
He fought for years to erect, in the heart of Paris, a tower that nobody wanted. This metal tower was seen as an act of aggression. The local residents were furious.
Against all the odds, Eiffel would take the helm of a gigantic building site, take on previously insurmountable challenges, and revolutionize the construction techniques of the age. The challenge was to build something very tall in a short amount of time. It was an unprecedented technical feat.
More than anything, Eiffel would be beset by scandal and come close to bankruptcy. How did Gustave Eiffel overcome these challenges? How did he succeed in erecting the tallest tower on the planet in just two years, two months, and five days?
This is the incredible story of the Eiffel Tower. This incredible tale began in the Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret. Two complete unknowns were dreaming up a crazy project.
To build the world's highest tower. It was June 1884. A far cry from today's modern buildings, the area consisted mainly of factories and a firm of architects who designed bridges and railway stations.
However, deep inside the workshop, two men had spent the previous few days working on a highly ambitious project. They were both engineers under the age of 30. Their names were Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier.
They were in the process of designing the century's most outrageous project. At first sight, it appeared to be a mundane sort of pylon, almost like our modern electricity pylons. In fact, it was a major architectural challenge that was unimaginably tall, almost 1,000 feet tall.
Unprecedented at the time. One thousand feet is 300 meters, an extraordinary distance to reach. The two engineers had the aim of breaking the record, for by the end of the 19th century, no man-made structure had reached 300 meters.
In fact, nothing had even come close, even the biggest of the Egyptian pyramids. That of Cheops, is no taller than 150 meters. The world's tallest tower had just been completed in the capital of the USA, the Washington Monument.
Its height is a mere 169 meters. To build something twice as tall, 300 meters, would be the feet of the century. The question was, "Would they manage it?
" Would France be the first country to build a 1,000-foot high tower? Koechlin and Nouguier were convinced that they could be successful thanks to technological innovation. The tower would be entirely made of iron, a building material much lighter than stone and just as durable.
After several checks and many calculations, they were finally sure. Breaking the height record was within their reach. The only problem was that before they could set their project in motion, they needed the green light from their boss.
He wasn't just any boss. He was one of France's greatest engineers and a celebrity in his field. His name, Gustave Eiffel.
Iron structures were his area of expertise. He had built many stations, viaducts and ever more ambitious bridges all over the world. Two current constructions were making headlines and still stand today.
One in the middle of the Massif Central is the huge Garabit Viaduct. One hundred and twenty meters above the river, it was the world's highest bridge at the time. Four hundred men spent two years working on it.
Gustave Eiffel knew how to promote this achievement and invited photographers to the building site. The other had an even higher media profile. The Statue of Liberty, America's most iconic monument.
It was a gift to the USA from France to celebrate the country's centennial. Its creator, the sculptor Auguste Bartholdi, asked Eiffel to help with the interior of the statue. In fact, the whole skeleton is made of iron.
This giant work was built in the heart of Paris before being dismantled and shipped to New York. For the entire duration of its construction, it was great publicity for Gustave Eiffel. People came to visit and see the statue.
Even the writer Victor Hugo had paid a visit and uttered a few historic words, giving Eiffel even greater kudos. As it meant, he was now recognized as a genuine pioneer in the art of metal construction. In the spring of 1884, Eiffel was not short of prestigious commissions.
Business was good, and he was not the type to go lightly into a new project. When the two young engineers came to him with their idea for a gigantic tower, his reaction was swift and resolute. Eiffel saw the drawing and said "I'm not interested.
" Just like that, I'm not interested. However, I want you to work on it. A 300-meter tower?
Why not? Gustave Eiffel asked his engineers to come up with something even more spectacular, more aesthetically pleasing. What he wanted was an edifice which would attract the crowds, for an idea was forming in his mind.
He wanted to present a project for an event that would take place in Paris in four years time, and which would have a global impact. An event which was in all the papers just a few days before. Yesterday morning, the government decided that a universal exhibition would open in Paris in 1889 to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution.
Universal exhibitions were highly prestigious global events, where the latest technical innovations were displayed. During this period, a wealth of such innovations had appeared. The electric locomotive, the first telephones, not to mention the first typewriters and photography.
It would be a huge communication exercise for the country, its industries and its reliability. However, Eiffel knew in order to be part of the exhibition, he would need something spectacular. Each exhibition had been defined by a monument able to thrill the world.
In the 1851 exhibition in London, the British had scored high with the Crystal Palace, a spectacular 40-metre-high structure made of glass and cast iron. A triumph of its time. The Paris edition of 1878 saw the construction of the monumental Trocadéro Palace.
A huge building which housed the capital's largest concert hall. For the forthcoming 1889 exhibition, something truly spectacular would be required. What was at stake?
The ability to show the world that France was a global leader, that French science and technology were among the best in the world. The reason that Eiffel was unconvinced by his engineer's project, was that he did not see how their projected tower would attract the crowds and make an impression. Their plans did not even include a staircase so that people could take in the view from the top.
Aesthetically, it left a lot to be desired. For Koechlin and Nouguier, it was back to the drawing board. They recruited a third man, Stephen Sauvestre, who was a friend of the business and an architect of some renown.
He agreed to work on his associate's pylon and completely transformed it. He designed arches between the feet, giving it a more harmonious look. However, the main thing he did was to turn the pylon into a leisure facility.
Visitors would be able to go up on it. There would be three storeys with restaurants and reception rooms. At the summit, there would be a dome with an incredible view and a beacon to light up the city.
It would be a tower like no other, and Parisians would probably even be willing to pay to get in. Their boss started to take an interest. He signed his name at the bottom of the sketch and offered the engineers a deal.
Emile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin agreed to cede all rights to the project to Gustave Eiffel. In return, they were offered a tidy sum, one percent each of the costs of the work if the tower was completed. This meant that each could potentially earn several hundred thousand francs, a small fortune.
First, they would have to be victorious at the Universal Exhibition. Gustave Eiffel was far from being the only challenger. The city's greatest architects would also be competing.
One of them stood out as a very serious opponent. His offices were just a few kilometers from Eiffel's workshop in the heart of Paris. He was none other than Jules Bourdais.
It was he who had built the Trocadéro Palace for the previous exhibition of 1878. He was a star among engineers and architects. One of the most famous French architects of the period.
Bourdais' response to Gustave Eiffel's iron tower, was a building with every chance of winning. It was a 1000-foot tower too. It was christened the Sun-Column.
It was divided into five levels. On the ground floor, a museum of electricity. Each floor would house hospital wards for invalids who needed to breathe the pure air at higher altitude.
At the very top, an electric beacon which would light up the Paris night as if it were daytime. It was a majestic project which had one major advantage, the tower would be made of stone, just like all the prestigious monuments of the age. Unlike Gustave Eiffel's metal tower project which was causing outrage.
Iron was not a respected material in the 1880s. It represented modernity. It represented industry.
It was the material one saw in train stations, warehouses, and factories. Opposed to Jules Bourdais's more classical stone tower, Eiffel's Iron Tower had every chance of being turned down by the Universal Exhibitions jury. Therefore, in order to win, Eiffel would use the influence of political friends in high places even if it meant employing questionable methods.
In early 1886, he had a meeting of the highest importance in Paris's Marais district. The man he had come to meet was Edouard Lacroix, who was not only the trade minister but also, more importantly, the man in charge of the forthcoming universal exhibition. Things looked promising for Eiffel, as the minister was not a great fan of Jules Bourdais' stone tower project.
He had commissioned a survey that showed him that there could be major construction issues. Its colossal weight meant that gigantic foundations would have to be excavated to ensure the tower did not collapse. It seemed risky.
Conversely, Eiffel's metal tower got his attention. This was a forward-looking structure. Eiffel now realized that he had a valuable ally.
His arguments eventually convinced Lacroix to promise his support in making the tower the gate to the Universal Exhibition in the heart of Paris, on the Champ de Mars. This was a huge step forward for the engineer, but that alone was not enough. The minister was not the only decision-maker.
A panel of 29 people would decide on the exhibition's flagship. At this point, Lacroix did Eiffel a huge favor. He simply rigged the competition.
A few weeks later, on May 2nd, 1886, Edward Lacroix published the rules in the Journal Officiel. Reading the details, reveals that the minister did everything in his power to help Gustave Eiffel. Competitors will have to study the possibility of erecting an iron tower on the Champ de Mars.
An iron tower, that alone was enough to eliminate Bourdais's stone tower. However, that was not the end of it. A tower with a square base with 125-meter sides and standing 300 meters tall.
What a coincidence. The prescribed dimensions were exactly those of Gustave Eiffel's project. The competition's specifications are the exact copy of the plans for the Eiffel Tower.
The competition was, in short, a sham. With the rules designed with his project in mind, Eiffel could not lose. Therefore, it was he who was tasked with building the world's tallest monument.
The inauguration date was set for March 31st, 1889. The tower would have to be completed in less than three years. This was a very short time frame to complete an unprecedented adventure with all its potential obstacles.
The problems began even before the first shovelful of Earth was turned over, with an attack Eiffel was simply not expecting. The Avenue de la Bourdonnais in the 7th arrondissement in Paris, has a fine selection of blocks of flats and mansions. Nowadays, these buildings have a splendid view of the Eiffel Tower.
However, at the time, the district looked like this. The Champ de Mars was a huge area of waste ground, with a few dwellings built by bourgeois families who appreciated the tranquility of this area between the city and the countryside. Among the inhabitants in late 1886 was one particularly incensed woman.
She was the Countess of Poor. The windows of her mansion looked out onto the Champ de Mars' esplanade. She had a view of a small park that had been created there for local residents on the banks of the sand.
Then she heard the 300-metre-high metal tower was going to be built in the middle of the garden. The Countess was livid. This tower would ruin her view and disturb the tranquility of her park.
With the aid of a neighbor, she attempted to get the construction stopped. The case took on greater and greater importance. Further explanation can be found in the archives at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
The imposing dossier is marked "300-meter-tower litigation". Inside is the original letter from the Countess's solicitor. In which he states that when she bought the land, she was given a guarantee that the park would remain a private garden for the use of its residents.
According to the Countess, this meant that the tower was therefore illegal. The park must be permanently preserved as a park, with a right of access for the plaintiff. This legal broadside threw everything up in the air.
The state was now reluctant to get involved. Meanwhile, work on the Champ de Mars site could not begin. This was particularly problematic for Gustave Eiffel, as any delay had financial implications.
He was at risk of financial collapse. Clarification can once again be found at the Musée d'Orsay archives, where a priceless document is held. It is an agreement signed by the state and Gustave Eiffel regarding the construction of the monument.
It explains that the engineer had a schedule to respect. The state contributions were dependent on the progress of the works. Five hundred thousand francs on completion of the first stage, 500,000 francs on completion of the second stage, and a further 500,000 francs when the project was completed in full.
Until these stages were completed, Eiffel would have to pay all the construction costs out of his own pocket. Each day the project was delayed cost him money, and there were less than two and a half years to go before the Universal Exhibition. The engineer could not afford the slightest delay, so he went for broke.
Should the women win their case, he would take responsibility for all costs, fines, damages, compensation, and interest. He would even pay for it from his own pocket. The engineer had gambled with everything he had, but this move reassured the authorities.
The state greenlighted the project. A few weeks later, the Countess and her friend lost their case. Meanwhile, work could, at last, begin.
On January 26th, the sound of men at work rang out across the Champ de Mars wasteland for the first time. A gigantic building site was underway using the methods available at the time. Spades, wheelbarrows, small horse-drawn carts.
The legal case had wasted a lot of time. The work would have to be fast. However, the early days had an unpleasant surprise in store.
Workers found a parcel of land which was completely waterlogged. It would be impossible to sink foundations in such muddy terrain. Indeed, two of the tower's pillars were very close to the river.
In order to find solid ground, the foundations would have to be dug well under the level of the riverbed. Gustave Eiffel then stunned Parisians with a staggering new technique. He used a system of watertight chambers to enable the workers to work beneath the surface of the water.
The idea was to use sealed metal chambers, which would be lowered into the river and fed with compressed air. The bottomless chambers were lowered into the mud, where the workers needed to dig out the foundations. The compressed air drove the water out, allowing the workers to stay dry and dig until they found the appropriate base.
The more the workmen dug, the deeper the chambers would sink. The mud was evacuated bit by bit via flues in the sides of the chambers. After a few days, the chambers reached a depth of 12 meters.
The workmen found the layer of limestone necessary to build the foundations. When they reached the layer of hard limestone, then the chambers were filled with cement and gravel to create the foundations which the Eiffel Tower rests on. The excavation chambers had been converted into the concrete blocks which would support the tower.
However, having overcome these technical challenges, Eiffel would then have to face a new attack. On February 14th, the newspaper Le Temps, dropped a bombshell. We come as writers, painters, sculptors, architects to protest with all our might and indignation against the erection of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower in the very heart of the capital.
The petition was signed by the greatest writers and artists of the period. In an impassioned treatise, they accused Eiffel of disfiguring Paris with what they called his factory chimney. There was a reluctance to look forward, a love of old stone, a mistrust of modernity.
They thought it was ugly. Eiffel was cut to the quick, but his counterattack was already prepared. He had been warned about the petition by a powerful friend of his, senator and press baron, Adrien Hebrard.
Notably, Hebrard was the director of the daily paper, Le Temps, in which the artists had launched their petition. He had alerted Eiffel before the paper was published, giving the engineer time to prepare his repost, which appeared in the same paper on the same day, just a few lines beneath it. Point by point, Eiffel countered the attacks, gently mocking his opponents.
There are, among the signatories, men whom I admire and hold in the highest esteem. Others are known for painting pretty little ladies, putting a flower on their bodice, or for wittily scribbling a few vaudeville verses. Well, frankly, I do not believe that all of France thinks as they do.
The protesters were ridiculed. The rear guard reaction had come too late. Now the work really needed to get going.
Eiffel used a particularly effective system to build his tower in record time before the deadline. Despite the Herculean nature of the building site, there were very few workers. At most, a few dozen people assembled the girders.
In fact, the 300-meter tower was not being built here, but a few kilometers away. In Eiffel's workshop, were some 40 draftsmen working in shifts to design the 18,000 pieces required for this gigantic puzzle. It was all built here, a tower in kit form.
Everything was perfected in a workshop. You had 18,000 modular pieces, like the ones in a construction play set, and they were taken to the Champ de Mars fully built. That was the secret of the tower, and that's what would make Gustave Eiffel the greatest builder of his time.
On-site, the major part of the work consisted of putting the parts together. It was a huge challenge. Every girder had to be fixed to the others with rivets, and that required four-man teams.
One worker heated the rivet, the second positioned it in the hole with a blacksmith's tongs, and two others hammered it from opposite sides to flatten the ends of the rivet. The rivet then cooled down and contracted as it cooled. In so doing, they pulled the iron plates tightly together.
In all, the workers fitted two and a half million rivets by hand. Thanks to this well-oiled organization, the tower gradually rose. However, Gustave Eiffel was still not sure he could complete the work.
He knew that one critical stage was just ahead. In December 1887, the work had been going on for 11 months. The pillars were now 60 meters high.
Only one-fifth of their total height. It was the moment of truth. Would the four-feet come together correctly?
Eiffel and his engineers reviewed their calculations again and again with a model of the tower. If the workers didn't manage to join the pylons perfectly, the tower would be out of kilter and unable to survive the winds and its own weight. We can see that as they started from the base elements 100 meters apart, and as they were at an oblique angle in the air, everything had to come together very precisely.
To complete the assembly perfectly, they had to be able to adjust those enormous feet. In theory, that was impossible. They weighed more than 70 tons.
However, inside the structure itself, Gustave Eiffel had worked out an ingenious system. On this diagram in red, these are hydraulic jacks. Giant pistons worked with a hand pump.
They could be used to slightly raise the tower's enormous feet. As a backup, Eiffel used a second system that had been known since ancient times, boxes of sand. They were placed at the top of the feet, between the scaffolding in the metal structure.
To tilt a pylon, they just had to open the box and let the sand run out. As soon as they reached the right angle of the incline, they closed the box again. Using a combination of the jacks and sandboxes, the workers would be able to line up the holes in the pylons with those in the transverse girders to place the rivets of the first floor.
December 17th, 1887, the critical day. At that moment, the future of the tower was at stake and it was a complete success. It was an extraordinary technical exploit.
It required a level of organization that had never been seen, and it succeeded. Less than a year after the first pickaxe broke the ground, the joining of the feet was carried out smoothly. The girders were assembled without a single bit of filing being necessary.
The tower now had a solid base, from which you could rise to the projected 300 meters. What's more, by getting over the hurdle of the first floor, Eiffel received the first cheque of his state subsidy, 500,000 francs. In principle, it was all looking good but financially, the works were becoming a bottomless pit.
Eiffel reviewed his calculations. There was one thing which was costing much more than expected. One thing they couldn't do without, the elevators.
Today, they carry nearly 20,000 people a day from the ground to the first floor, then from there to the top. Taking an elevator up 300 meters seems completely commonplace today, but at that time, it required a huge technical exploit and a great deal of money. Of course, at the end of the 19th century, the elevator was a new contraption.
The first one was designed in 1851 by the American, Otis. On his plans, he boldly proved the efficiency of the emergency brake by cutting the cable that held the platform of his lift. In France, it was the engineer Leon Edoux who exhibited the first prototype at the Universal Exhibition of 1867.
However, for the tower, much more complex elevators would be needed. It was necessary to design lifts for an unprecedented height, and that also, of course, had to have a very high capacity. One difficulty was that the tower was convex between the ground and the second floor.
The lifts had to be a combination of funicular railway and lift that rolled along a track and weren't just simple vertical lifts. It was really very technical, complex, and innovative for the times. Gustave Eiffel knew that people were hoping he would fail.
Ever since his first project, his rivals had expressed doubts about the feasibility of installing elevators in a tower that wasn't straight. He called in the best. The American, Otis, built two lifts to go up to the second floor.
They rebuilt bit by bit in New York and could carry 50 people at a time. Two other elevators, slowly, but double the size, would go only as far as the first floor. They were designed by Frenchmen, Roux, Combaluzier et Lepape.
These elevators ran on rails up an incline following the curve of the tower. The most complex elevator was the one that went up to the third floor. Of course, it was a straight run, but it had to rise 160 meters to reach the top, which had never been done.
Eiffel turned to the French engineer, Leon Edoux, who had a brilliant idea. At the time, elevators were generally operated by a piston that pushed the cabin upwards, but in this case, the height was so great that it would have needed an enormous piston that could have never been housed in the structure. Edoux found a solution to reduce the distance by half.
He would use two cabins linked by a cable that ran over a pulley. Rather than going directly from the second to the third floor, he envisaged two cabins as counterweights on one cable. The upper cabin coming down as the other went up.
The lower cabin only went half the distance, therefore, and the piston that pushed it was only half the size. To go all the way up there was nothing simpler. Obviously, at the halfway point they were at exactly the same level, and that's where the cabins stopped.
The passengers changed cabins and carried on their journey. Thanks to these different systems, people would soon be able to go up to the top of the tallest tower in the world in a matter of ten minutes. Soon, but not immediately because the elevators weren't yet ready.
They now had to be built, and that was very expensive. Now, the tower wasn't going to cost four and a half million francs, but seven million, the equivalent of over €100 million Euros today. How could they raise such a sum of money in a few months?
Eiffel managed to do it by arranging an enormous financial coup on the other side of the world. Nine thousand kilometers from the Champ de Mars, another gigantic work site was under way. To link the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, they were digging a canal in the small state of Panama in Central America.
It was the work of a French architect, Ferdinand de Lesseps. He was known throughout the world for digging another canal 15 years earlier at Suez in Egypt, between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. It was a huge success, which brought Lesseps a flattering nickname, the Great Frenchman.
They called him the Great Frenchman because he achieved the exploit that even the Pharaohs couldn't accomplish, and his prestige was sky-high, not only in France but throughout the world. However, in Panama, the Great Frenchman was facing disaster. He had wanted to repeat his exploit by cutting a canal between two seas, but this time things didn't go according to plan.
The Panama Canal was, in fact, much more difficult to dig than the Suez Canal. In Egypt, the ground was sand and soft earth. He committed a technical error.
He wanted to do the Panama Canal, as he had done the Suez Canal, but he hadn't taken into account the mountain that was in the middle. It wasn't possible. As well as the technical problems, the workers had to cope with tropical rain and yellow fever.
Thousands were dying. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Lesseps sought a solution.
Since it was impossible to cut through the mountain, he had to find another way of getting the boats through. It would be possible with huge metal locks like these. There was one man capable of building such locks, the King of Iron, Gustave Eiffel.
Lesseps called on his colleague for help. Eiffel realized that he had a chance to get out of trouble financially, so he imposed conditions and raised the stakes. Eiffel's reaction at that moment was to say, "Very well, I'll do it.
" "However, it's going to cost you. " "Not only do I want a considerable sum, I want to be paid in advance. " Eiffel was giving a huge order.
A dozen locks, for which he asked a very large sum of money. He was paid an advance of 70 million. That's ten times the cost of the Eiffel Tower.
From then on, there were no further money problems for the tower. Panama financed the tower. That was the masterly gamble that Eiffel pulled off.
Eiffel's financial problems were over. The tower continued to make headway and became more and more popular. The object that nobody wanted to see now became a place to visit, where Parisians were amazed to see how fast the works were progressing.
For them, it was like living a fairy tale. It was a show, and they went to see it with pleasure and pride. It must be said that there was no other building like the tower.
At 170 meters, it was the highest building in the world and still growing. It was the demonstration of French savoir faire. Gustave Eiffel was optimistic.
There were still eight months to go before the inauguration. They'd just finished the second floor. It seemed that nothing could hinder the works now, and that's when the very people who, for months had been building the tower turned against him.
One morning in September 1888, the workers put down their tools and went on strike. They were protesting against their working conditions. To keep to the deadlines, they'd been asked to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day in summer and nine in winter.
Every morning, they had to climb up ladders and stairs almost 200 meters above the ground. They had to eat up there so as not to waste time coming down during their break. Up there, it could be windy and bitterly cold.
The height was more and more dizzying. The teams demanded danger money. For Gustave Eiffel, the strike could not have come at a worse moment, and he was offended by the claims.
After all, he'd never had a single death on any of his works. As much as he tried to make his building site a model site, he still didn't tolerate opposition. He told the workers that it was no more dangerous to work up at 200 meters than at 50.
If ever anyone were to fall, the result would be the same. He told them, "I'll reduce the number of working hours" "for those prepared to go up" "because of the extra time it takes to get there. " "Instead of working 12 hours, we reduce it to nine" "and I won't increase your wages.
" "I'll give you a bonus when the tower is completed. " After a few days of negotiations, the men went back to work. This time, Eiffel knew that nothing would stop the tower now.
He had won his bet. On Sunday, March 31st, 1889, Gustave Eiffel climbed the three levels of the tower, accompanied by one of his daughters and several officials. Two years, two months, and five days after the start of the work, he raised the French flag over the highest monument in the world.
The inauguration was an amazing success. On the 31st of March, exactly as he had said in '85, he hoisted the French flag to the top of the tower. It was a triumphant day.
However, Gustave Eiffel didn't forget that building the Eiffel Tower had cost him a great deal of money. Seven million francs. About €100 million today.
From now on, the gamble was to make the tower viable, and he had it all planned. Standing at the end of the Champ de Mars, the tower served as the entrance to the Universal Exhibition. A gigantic gateway that attracted attention, all the more so, because it was lit up at night and was completely red.
The first way to protect the iron, was with iron oxides and linseed oil, both of which are naturally red. In 1889, it was completely red. The main source of profit was, of course, the sale of tickets.
The prices were fixed by the state. To go up to the top of the tower cost two francs on Sundays and five francs during the week, which would be 55 euros today. Expensive, but the tower's power of attraction was such that people were fighting to get tickets.
Even though the elevators weren't working yet, 29,000 people bought tickets on the first day to climb up to the third level and see for the first time what people still flock to see today. The unrestricted view of the capital. At the very top, Gustave Eiffel had kept some rooms for himself.
They were the only private places in the tower. All the rest was designed to be a place for leisure. On the second level, a cannon was fired at noon every day.
There was also a 250-seat theater, restaurants to cater to 4,000 people, tobacconists, souvenir shops and photographers, and Eiffel received rent from every one of them. The tower's success was immediate and worldwide. The visitors' book shows that the actress Sarah Bernhardt in The Cowboy Buffalo Bill came, as well as crowned heads like the Prince of Wales, future Edward the Seventh of England, or the young Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanoff, son of the Tsar and himself, future Tsar of Russia, under the name of Nicholas II.
However, for Gustave Eiffel, the visit that counted above all the others was that of Thomas Edison. The American inventor of the electric light bulb, and the phonograph, gratified the French engineer with a ringing tribute. To Mr Eiffel, the engineer, the brave builder of so gigantic and original specimen of modern engineering from one who has the greatest admiration.
The exhibition lasted six months and was an enormous success. Two million visitors. The ticket sales easily repaid the cost of the works, and this money was added to the money from the Panama Canal.
Gustave Eiffel was now extremely rich. However, there was one point still bothering him. The tower was temporary.
This had been the plan from the very beginning and the agreement signed with the state. Eiffel could manage the tower for 20 years. Then, the land would be given back to the city of Paris, and most probably the tower would be demolished.
He wanted to avoid that at all costs. To save the tower beyond the planned 20 years, Eiffel wanted to prove that it was more than just a distraction, and that it could be useful to the advance of science, so he multiplied the experiments. He made the tower into a meteorological station, where he carried out tests on wind pressure.
He was convinced that by making it indispensable, he would save it from destruction. However, he hadn't accounted for an event that he hadn't anticipated at all. An event that would throw him into the middle of a huge scandal and drag his name into the mud.
The affair erupted on September 6th, 1892, and made the front pages of the press, The Panama Scandal. Gustave Eiffel was seriously implicated. What had happened?
To understand, we have to go back several months. Remember, the works on the Panama Canal had been heading for disaster. Cutting into the mountain was a nightmare.
To get out of trouble, Ferdinand de Lesseps placed an order with Gustave Eiffel for a number of locks, and he paid the top price for them. Seventy million francs at the time. To raise this money, Lesseps had an idea to appeal to small savers by launching a national loan, but to do that he needed the support of French members of parliament, and that's where it all went wrong.
To do this, a law had to be voted in Parliament. To get the law passed, he bribed MPs, so the Panama affair was a case of corruption. Corrupt members of Parliament had encouraged the French people to invest in a high risk venture.
The Panama Company collapsed and thousands of small savers were completely ruined. Gustave Eiffel was in a delicate position because, whereas the company went bankrupt, he made 33 million francs profit with that contract for the locks. In short, he had made a lot of money while the French people had lost theirs.
The fact that he got rich while whole families were flat broke, obviously, that caused a lot of anger. To which Eiffel replied, "I haven't wronged anyone. I was just lucky.
" "Why are they picking on me? " However, for the far right, Eiffel was a choice target. Not only because he'd made a lot of money, Eiffel had always been attacked because of his foreign origins.
Gustave had not always been only called Eiffel. As this register shows, the engineer was born with the name Eiffel Bonickhausen. The name came from his Germanic ancestors, albeit very distant.
The family had been settled in France since Louis the 14th. Even so, at the time, Bonickhausen was not an easy name to carry. A few years earlier, in 1870, France had lost a war against Germany, a national disaster after which German names were suspect.
Eiffel had Bonickhausen removed from his official papers, but that made no difference to his enemies. He was still called a German, and more strangely, he was also called a Jew. At the time, it was quite often thought that people with German names were Jews.
It was classic in people's imaginations to associate a German name with being a Jew. In fact, this association would never go away until after Nazism, when people no longer tended to imagine that a German name was Jewish. At a time when Jews were everybody's scapegoat, it was yet another pretext to attack Eiffel in his turn, as did this anti-Semitic author several months earlier.
Well-informed people assure us that Eiffel, who turns up from the other side of the Rhine with a tower, is nothing less than a Jew. There are some ideas are only found in the brain of a Jew. Nobody but a Jew would propose such a venture.
In the face of these attacks, Eiffel was forced to vindicate himself in the newspapers. I am neither Jew nor German. I was born in France, in Dijon, to French Catholic parents.
However, with the Panama scandal, the insinuation started up again. The hero of the tower was said to be a foreigner who wanted to ruin France. In an explosive atmosphere, he was finally convicted of abuse of confidence.
He was reproached for having asked for more money than he really needed. In short, he had taken advantage of the situation. Eiffel was found guilty.
He risked going to prison, but he fought back and took the affair to the final Court of Appeal. The Appeal Court annulled his conviction. However, they didn't give a new judgment based on the evidence, but by simply stating that the facts were inadmissible.
In short, Eiffel did not retrieve his honor. Eiffel then started a descent into hell. His name, which had been praised to the heavens three years before, was now synonymous with scandal.
Humiliation followed humiliation. In Dijon, his native town, they had named this bridge after the King of Iron. Four years later, the town council changed the name.
The esteem of the public for Eiffel hit rock bottom. People thought he was a crook The tower wasn't doing much better. It was as if its destiny was linked to the fate of its creator.
It was being spurned. The drop in attendance was spectacular. From two million visitors in 1889 to eight times fewer in 1893, the year Eiffel was convicted.
His opponents had him in their sights in a commission presided over by Eiffel's old rival, the architect Jules Bourdais, who was clamoring for the tower's demolition. The district had to be reorganized. They had to get rid of that monster.
Eiffel retired from business and devoted himself to his scientific experiments. However, he was chomping at the bit. There were only 10 years left till the end of the contract.
He had to prevent the destruction of his work. However, a stranger would change the tower's destiny. While Gustave Eiffel was at his lowest ebb, a 45-year-old army officer came to see him.
His name was Gustave Ferrié, and he had opted to serve in the technical branch, so to speak, and he was a specialist in remote transmission. The TSF wireless telegraphy was the precursor of radio, a completely new field that was beginning to be researched. It would soon be possible to communicate through the airwaves with no wires at all.
Captain Ferrier had discovered that the bigger the aerial you had at your disposal, the further you could communicate. The tower was ideal for his experiments. However, Ferrier wasn't supported by his superiors.
The army was still using homing pigeons to carry their messages and didn't believe in this business of communication with waves. Eiffel didn't hesitate for a moment. He was a scientist, and he was convinced by Ferrier's experiments.
If the tower could help the army, perhaps it would be saved. He took on all the costs and he never regretted it. The first communications were between the tower and the pantheon.
In 1906, Ferrier managed to communicate with the eastern border of the country. A year later, he linked up with North Africa. Another five years and he was able to contact Washington.
Progress was staggering. The Army could no longer ignore the importance of such an invention. That was when the fate of the tower changed completely.
There was no longer any talk of dismantling the tower after 20 years. Forget it, it's all over, we keep the tower. Gustave Eiffel saved his tower once and for all with the TSF.
His great work would, year after year, be confirmed as the emblem of Paris and France. Gustave Eiffel died in 1923 at the age of 91. The Eiffel Tower was then still the tallest monument in the world, exactly 312 meters high, including the flag.
However, the race to reach the clouds had become worldwide. In 1931, in New York, the Empire State Building became the tallest building on the planet, 381 meters, 70 higher than the Eiffel Tower. It reigned overall for 40 years.
In 1973, still in New York, the World Trade Center passed the 400-meter mark with its twin towers that have since disappeared. In 2004, the competition moved to Asia. The Taipei Tower in Taiwan stands at 500 meters.
Then, in 2010, the Burj Khalifa Tower in Dubai, 828 meters. Next to come the Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia, which will be the first to break the symbolic one-kilometer-high barrier. That's more than three Eiffel Towers standing on top of each other.
For a long time now, the old Iron Lady has not been the biggest, but she showed the way to a line of giants.
