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THE EIFFEL TOWER WAS NOT MEANT TO LAST!
It still stands today and is one of the most visited monuments in the World!
This 300 metres high giant was conceived as part of preparations for the World's Fair of 1889.
Emile Nouguier and Maurice Koechlin, the two chief engineers in
Eiffel's company, had the idea for a very tall tower in June 1884. It
was to be designed like a large pylon with four columns of lattice work
girders, separated at the base and coming together at the top, and
joined to each other by more metal girders at regular intervals. The
company had by this time mastered perfectly the principle of building
bridge supports. The tower project was a bold extension of this
principle up to a height of 300 metres equivalent to the symbolic
figure of 1000 feet.
On September 18 1884 Eiffel registered a patent "for a new
configuration allowing the construction of metal supports and pylons
capable of exceeding a height of 300 metres".
The assembly of the supports began on July 1 1887, and was completed
twenty-two months later. All the elements were prepared in the factory
at Levallois-Perret on the outskirts of Paris, where Eiffel's company
was located. Each of the 18 000 pieces used in the Tower was designed
and calculated, traced out to an accuracy of a tenth of a millimetre
and then put together, in pieces of around five metres each. Between
150 and 300 workers on the building site, led by a team of veterans of
the great metal viaduct projects, were responsible for assembling this
gigantic meccano set.
In 1889 the tower was a colossal fairground attraction, From the day of
its inauguration in 1889, tourists and celebrities rubbed shoulders on
the Tower, A total of two million people made the ascent. During the
1920s it became a symbol of modernity and the avant-garde, inspiring
poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire, film-makers, photographers and
numerous painters.
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Who was EIFFEL ?
Born in Dijon in 1832, he graduated from the Ecole Centrale des Arts et
Manufactures in 1855, the same year that Paris hosted the first world's
Fair. He spent several years in the South West of France, where he
supervized work on the great railway bridge in Bordeaux, and afterwards
he set up in his own right in 1864 as a "constructor", that is, as a
business specializing in metal structural work. His outstanding career
as a constructor was marked by work on the Porto viaduct over the river
Douro in 1876, the Garabit viaduct in 1884, Pest railway station in
Hungary, the dome of the Nice observatory, and the ingenious structure
of the Statue of Liberty. It culminated in 1889 with the Eiffel Tower.
After the end of his career in business, marred by the failure of the
Panama Canal, Eiffel began an active life of scientific experimental
research in the fields of meteorology, radiotelegraphy and
aerodynamics. He died on December 27 1923.
Eiffel strongly encouraged research into radio transmission by
proposing the use of his tower as a monumental radio mast. After the
success of the first radio signals broadcast to the Pantheon by
Ducretet in 1898, Eiffel approached the military authorities in 1901
with a view to making the Tower into a long-distance radio antenna. In
1903 a radio connection was made with the military bases around Paris,
and then a year later with the East of France. A permanent radio
station was installed in the Tower in 1906, thus ensuring its
continuing survival. Eiffel lived long enough to hear the first
European public radio broadcast from an aerial on the Tower in 1921.
Do you know that the Eiffel tower changed colour several times?
Being made of iron, the Tower has been protected from oxidation by
several layers of paint, which ensure that it will last for ever. The
Tower has been repainted seventeen times since it was built, an average
of once every seven years. It has changed colour several times, passing
from red-brown to yellow-ochre, then to chestnut brown and finally to
the bronze of today, slightly shaded off towards the top to ensure that
the colour is perceived to be the same all the way up as it stands
against the Paris sky.
Fifty tons of paint are needed to cover it, and it takes a team of 25
painters nearly a year to paint it from top to bottom.
The EIFFEL TOWER WAS NOT MEANT TO LAST
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