Gustave Eiffel

Gustave Eiffel: The Man Who Calculated the Wind

A month before the first stone was cut, forty of France's most celebrated artists published a letter in *Le Temps* denouncing "the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower." Gounod signed it. So did Maupassant, Dumas *fils*, Leconte de Lisle, Sully Prudhomme, Bouguereau, Meissonier — and Charles Garnier, who had built the Paris Opera. They called it a gigantic black factory chimney that would spread across the city like a stain of dark ink. Eiffel's reply was that engineers care about beauty too, and seek elegance as well as solidity. He then built it anyway, and the argument has not been reopened.

Dijon, and a Choice of Schools

Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel was born in Dijon on 15 December 1832, the son of François Alexandre Boenickhausen dit Eiffel and Catherine Mélanie Moineuse. He took baccalaureates in both science and humanities at the Lycée Royal in Dijon and was accepted by École Polytechnique and École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures. He chose École Centrale — the practical school rather than the prestigious one — and graduated in 1855. The choice is the man in miniature.

In 1858, aged twenty-five, he directed the construction of an iron railway bridge over the Garonne at Bordeaux. He served as chief engineer to the Belgian Railway Material Company until 1865, and in 1866 set up his own metal structural works. The following year he designed the Gallery of Machines for the Paris Exhibition. He had found his material, and he would spend the next thirty years learning what iron could be asked to do.

Arches Over Gorges

The great bridges came in the 1870s and 1880s. At Porto in 1877 he threw a steel arch of 525 feet across the Douro. At Garabit in 1884 he went further — a 540-foot arch carrying the railway 400 feet above the Truyère, then the highest bridge in the world.

These structures were the argument for everything that followed. A masonry arch resists by mass; Eiffel's arches resist by geometry, using lattices of wrought iron in which almost every member is doing calculable work and nothing is present for reassurance. They look skeletal because they are.

In 1879 the death of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc left a commission vacant, and Eiffel inherited the problem of making Bartholdi's colossal statue stand up in New York harbour. His solution abandoned the idea of the copper skin carrying its own weight and hung it instead on an internal iron skeleton — a structure that could flex, expand and contract independently of its cladding. He built it, took it apart, and shipped it. The Statue of Liberty opened in 1886.

Three Hundred Metres

The tower was built for the Exposition Universelle of 1889. Construction began on 14 February 1887 and took roughly two years. It stood 300 metres — 984 feet — and was assembled from some 12,000 components and two and a half million rivets. Its most-repeated statistic is the one that best explains it: melted down, all that iron would fill its own square base to a depth of about two and a half inches. It is very nearly nothing, arranged extremely well.

The curve of its legs is not decoration. It is the shape of the wind load, worked out in advance — the profile at which the overturning force of a gale is met by the structure's own geometry at every height. Eiffel had designed a building whose principal enemy was not gravity but air, and he had calculated the enemy.

The Panama Disaster

In 1887 he also agreed to build the locks for the Panama Canal. The venture collapsed into what his own profession's account calls the biggest financial scandal of the century, and it cost him his reputation and his honour. He was sixty. The most famous engineer in France left contracting altogether.

The Wind Tunnels

What he did next is the part most people never hear. He turned the tower into an instrument — measuring wind resistance, taking meteorological observations, running experiments in radio transmission. He built a wind tunnel at its base and a larger one on the Rue Boileau in 1909. He founded the first aerodynamics laboratory at Auteuil and gave it to the French state in 1921. He published *Resistance of the Air and Aviation* in 1907, and worked on meteorology until he died.

He was president of the French Society of Civil Engineers in 1889, an officer of the Legion of Honour, and in 1913 the Smithsonian Institution gave him the Samuel P. Langley Medal for Aerodynamics.

Why Gustave Is Called a Genius

The faculty is quantitative imagination: the ability to hold a structure's behaviour in mathematics before it exists in iron, and to trust the numbers over the eye. Eiffel's contemporaries built for loads they could feel. He built for a load nobody could see, and the tower's silhouette is the visible answer to an invisible equation. That is a genuine conceptual advance and not merely good contracting.

The honest counter-case has three parts. First, much of what carries his name is the output of a large firm — he was an industrialist running a metal structural works, and the products of such a company are collective. Second, the Statue of Liberty commission reached him because Viollet-le-Duc died, and that is circumstance rather than merit. Third, and most damning, the same judgement that produced Garabit produced Panama: he committed to the canal locks and was engulfed in a financial catastrophe that cost him his standing, which is not the record of a man whose assessments were reliably superior.

There is also a case that the popular verdict honours the wrong achievement. The tower made him immortal, but it is an engineering monument built on principles he had already proved at Garabit. The genuinely original work — the systematic measurement of air resistance, the wind tunnels, the laboratory he handed to the nation — came afterwards, when he was no longer building anything. Aviation was three years old when he started. He was among the first people to study, rather than guess at, the medium it would move through, and that is a better claim to originality than the tower is.

Legacy

He had married Marie Gaudelet in 1862 and had five children; she died of pneumonia in 1887, the year the tower's foundations were dug. He died in Paris in December 1923, aged ninety-one.

The tower was meant to be temporary. It survived because it turned out to be useful — as a radio mast, a weather station, an aerodynamic laboratory — which is exactly the argument Eiffel made to the artists who wanted it stopped. The forty signatories are now remembered chiefly for having signed.

Achievements

• Knight of the Legion of Honour — 1878
• Officer of the Legion of Honour — 1889
• Notable work: Garabit Viaduct
• Notable work: Pont métallique sur l'Adour
• Notable work: Eiffel Tower
• Notable work: Statue of Liberty
• Educated at École Centrale Paris and Collège Sainte-Barbe
• Worked as civil engineer, architect and entrepreneur