Gustave Eiffel biography

Synopsis

Early Life

Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel was born in Dijon, France in 1832. Interested in construction at an early age, he attended the École Polytechnique and later the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures (College of Art and Manufacturing) in Paris, graduating in 1855. After graduation, Eiffel specialized in metal construction, most notably bridges. He worked on several over the next few decades, letting mathematics find ways to build lighter, stronger structures.

Early Projects

One of Eiffel's first projects came in 1858, when he oversaw the building of an iron bridge at Bordeaux, and by 1866 Eiffel had set up his own company. By the time he designed the arched Gallery of Machines for the Paris Exhibition of 1867, his reputation was solidified. Also in 1967, he designed the 525-foot steel arch bridge over the Douro River in Oporto, Portugal. Working from the same design nearly 20 years later, he built the renowned 540-foot Garabit viaduct in Truyère, France (suspended 400 feet above the surface of the water, it was the highest bridge in the world for years after its construction).

As his career advanced, Eiffel moved away from bridgework, such as in 1879 when he created the dome for the astronomical observatory in Nice, France, notable in that the dome was movable. That same year, when the Statue of Liberty's initial internal engineer, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, unexpectedly died, Eiffel was hired as the new engineer. Eiffel created a new support system for the statue that would rely on a skeletal structure instead of weight to support the copper skin. He and his team built the statue from the ground up and then dismantled it for its journey to New York Harbor.

Eiffel Tower

Eiffel is most famous for what would become known as the Eiffel Tower, which was begun in 1887 for the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris. The tower is composed of 12,000 different components and 2,500,000 rivets, all designed and assembled to handle wind pressure. The structure is a marvel in material economy, which Eiffel perfected in his years of building bridges—if it were melted down, the tower's metal would only fill up its base about two and a half inches deep. Onlookers were both awed that Eiffel could build the world's tallest structure (at 984 feet) in just two years and torn by the Eiffel Tower's unique design, most deriding it as hideously modern and useless. Despite the tower's immediate draw as a tourist attraction, only years later did critics and Parisians begin to view the structure as a work of art.