Gustave Eiffel

Gustave Eiffel was born Alexandre Gustave Bonickhausen in Dijon, Burgundy, France, on December 15, 1832. The family came from the Rhineland, and its German surname, Boenickhausen, was later changed to Eiffel and officially recognized. His father, François Alexandre Boenickhausen, known as “Eiffel,” was a former hussar in the armies of Napoleon BonaparteNapoleon BonaparteNapoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), known as Napoleon I, was a French military leader and statesman who was first consul of the French Republic from 1799 to 1804 and emperor of the French from 1804 to 1814 and again in 1815. In 1803 he sold the Louisiana territory to the United States, and in 1804 he promulgated the French Civil Code.Open the full entry; his mother, Catherine Mélanie Moneuse, the daughter of a timber merchant, founded a coal-trading business that her husband later joined.⁠[1][2][3][4]

From 1843 to 1850 Eiffel attended the college in Dijon. After failing the oral examination for the École Polytechnique, he studied at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures from 1852 to 1855, specializing in chemistry, and graduated in 1855; he then specialized in metal construction, especially bridges.⁠[4][2][1]

A family dispute kept Eiffel out of his uncle’s paint business, and from 1856 he worked for the engineer Charles Nepveu and then for a railway company. In 1858, at 26, he took charge of building the Bordeaux railway bridge over the Garonne, followed by several other bridges.⁠[3][4][1]

In 1864 Eiffel set up on his own as a consulting engineer, and in late 1866 he founded G. Eiffel et Cie. at 48 rue Fouquet in Levallois-Perret, specializing in metal construction. In 1867 he completed the Rouzat and Neuvial viaducts on the Sioule River in central France and designed the lofty arched Gallery of Machines for the Paris Exhibition. After 1870 he tried to move operations to Peru and Chile but soon gave up.⁠[4][3][1]

In 1875 Eiffel’s company won commissions for the Western Railway Station in Budapest and for the Maria Pia Bridge in Porto, Portugal, designed with Théophile Seyrig. Ordered in 1876, the bridge spanned the Douro River in 1877 with a 525-foot (160-meter) steel arch.⁠[3][4][1]

The Garabit Viaduct, begun in 1880 and completed in 1884, crosses the Truyère River in southern France with a 540-foot (162-meter) arch 400 feet (120 meters) above the stream, and for many years it was the highest bridge in the world. Eiffel was one of the first engineers to use compressed-air caissons in bridge building, and he also designed the movable dome of the observatory at Nice.⁠[4][2][1]

In 1881–82 Eiffel designed the internal structure of the Statue of Liberty, the work of Frédéric Auguste BartholdiFrédéric Auguste BartholdiFrédéric Auguste Bartholdi (1834–1904) was a French sculptor who designed the Statue of Liberty (“Liberty Enlightening the World”), France’s gift to the United States, unveiled in New York on October 28, 1886; his other works include the Lion of Belfort.Open the full entry; Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and Eiffel designed the four steel supports for its copper skin. When the statue was reassembled on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor in 1886, Eiffel’s iron framework was the first piece put back together.⁠[4][5][6]

In June 1884 Émile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin, engineers in Eiffel’s company, which then ranked fourth or fifth among French firms in its field, conceived a 300-meter tower. Eiffel registered the patent on September 18, 1884, and developed the design with them and the architect Stephen Sauvestre. In 1886 it was chosen from among 107 projects.⁠[7][3][8]

Work on the tower began on January 26, 1887. On February 14, 1887, a protest signed by Charles Gounod, Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas fils, Charles Garnier and others appeared in Le Temps, and Eiffel replied in the same paper. The tower’s 18,038 metal parts were preassembled with rivets at the Levallois-Perret works and mounted on site, using 2,500,000 rivets and 7,300 tonnes of wrought iron; the first floor was reached on April 1, 1888, the second on August 14, 1888, and the top was completed on March 31, 1889, after 2 years, 2 months and 5 days, without any serious injuries or deaths during construction.⁠[7][8]

Built for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, which marked the centennial of the French Revolution, the tower opened to the public on May 15, 1889, the opening day of the fair, and received more than 2 million visitors in its first year. BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry’s article notes that it earned Eiffel the nickname “magician of iron.”⁠[7][8][1]

In 1887 Eiffel’s company took on the contract to build ten giant locks for the Panama Canal. After the Panama Canal company was liquidated on February 4, 1889, Eiffel, Ferdinand de LessepsFerdinand de LessepsFerdinand de Lesseps (1805–1894) was a French diplomat who led the building of the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, and later headed France’s failed attempt to dig a canal across Panama; in 1884 he presented the Statue of Liberty to the United States on behalf of the Franco-American Union.Open the full entry and de Lesseps’s son were indicted for fraud; in 1893 Eiffel was sentenced to two years in prison and a fine of 2,000 francs, a ruling later annulled by France’s Cour de cassation.⁠[2][3][4]

The Panama affair ended Eiffel’s career as a contractor, and he withdrew from business; the biography on the Eiffel family website records that he sold his shares and retired from the company in 1890.⁠[3][2][4]

In 1889 Eiffel set up a meteorological observatory on the tower, which he went on to use for wind-resistance experiments and as an aerial mast for radio; his experiments of 1894–1898 included early radio transmissions. From 1903 to 1909 he studied aerodynamics and built a wind tunnel at the foot of the tower on the Champ de Mars, and in 1909 he built a larger wind tunnel on the rue Boileau in Auteuil, Paris, the first aerodynamic laboratory, which is still in use.⁠[4][2][9][1]

He kept working in the laboratory through World War I, designing a monoplane fighter aircraft in 1917, and in 1921 he gave the laboratory to the state. The Connexion notes that after leaving business he spent some 30 working years as a scientist.⁠[1][4][9]

Eiffel died on December 27, 1923, at his Paris residence at 1 rue Rabelais in the 8th arrondissement, aged 91, and was buried in the Levallois-Perret cemetery.⁠[2][4]

In 1862 Eiffel married Marguerite Gaudelet; they had five children between 1863 and 1873: Claire, Laure, Valentine, Édouard and Albert. Marguerite died in 1877 at the age of 32.⁠[2][4]

Originally called the “300-meter Tower,” the Eiffel Tower now stands 330 meters high and weighs about 10,100 tons; about 60 tons of protective paint are renewed every 7 years. It has three public levels and receives a little over 6 million visitors a year.⁠[8]

La tour Eiffel: Official website: https://www.toureiffel.paris/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]