Eiffel E-Book

David I Harvie

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 479

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Beschreibung

The Eiffel Tower is perhaps the most famous tall building in the world, an icon of its own age and ours. It was the dream-child of French engineer Gustave Eiffel, along with Budapest railway station, the Douro Bridge in Portugal and the interior skeleton of the Statue of Liberty. In this new biography of Eiffel, the first for many years, David I. Harvie reveals the determination, struggle and drama which characterised the life of this talented man. The Eiffel Tower was proposed as the centrepiece for the World Exhibition of 1889, yet the moment the plans were unveiled they were greeted with a storm of protests. An influential Artists' Protest was vocal in its criticism; Eiffel became involved in an extended argument with Charles Garnier, architect of the Paris Opera; and satirists had a field day. Robust in his defence of the tower, Eiffel had the last laugh: when completed, the tower became an instant favourite and a moneyspinner. Yet, at the moment of his triumph, scandal beckoned. While the tower was being built Eiffel had signed contracts for the biggest and riskiest project of his life - the construction of the locks for the Panama Canal. In 1889 the canal company was plunged into liquidation due to mismanagement. Eiffel was charged with breach of trust and swindling and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. Although cleared on appeal, the engineer from Dijon never quite recovered from the personal indignity of the scandal. The man who had designed and built aqueducts and bridges throughout the world turned his back on engineering and embarked on an equally illustrious career in the study of aerodynamics.

Leseprobe

EIFFEL

For Rose Harvie and Maggie Anne Cullen Harvie

EIFFEL

THE GENIUS WHO REINVENTED HIMSELF

DAVID I. HARVIE

First published in 2004 by Sutton Publishing

This paperback edition first published in 2006

The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved © David I. Harvie, 2004, 2013

The right of David I. Harvie to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9505 7

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1

Beginnings

2

‘Iron, iron, nothing but iron’

3

The Bridge-builder

4

‘The shapes arise!’

5

Liberty

6

‘A tower of very great height’

7

The Tower Rises

8

‘Unique, strange and truly grandiose’

9

The Panama Plunder

10

New Directions

11

The International Icon

12

Whither Tallest?

Appendix 1 Works by Eiffel’s Company

Appendix 2 Eiffel’s Honoured Scientists

Appendix 3 Films Featuring the Eiffel Tower

Notes and References

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

When the suggestion was first made to me that I consider writing this book, my interest was immediately attracted by both the subject and his period in history. I believe there is always something especially curious and attractive about those people and events that have not long ago slipped over the horizon of the direct experience of anyone still living. The tantalising sense of intangibility that often precedes the fully rooted and well-understood place in history has an attraction of its own. In Britain at least – where Eiffel is surely less well known than he deserves – I hope the book’s subtitle will offer an intriguing hint of the progressive and public-spirited way in which he reacted to the extraordinary events that befell him and which caused him to reorganise his working life.

In addition to Eiffel’s many published works (some of them dauntingly heavy with technical and mathematical detail) and contemporary sources from France, Britain and the United States of America, I have drawn on previous books on the life of this internationally significant polymath. Many of these have now been long out of print. In particular, I draw attention to four volumes: François Poncetton’s Eiffel, Le Magicien du Fer, published in Paris in 1939; Joseph Harriss’s The Eiffel Tower, Symbol of an Age, published in London by Paul Elek in 1976 (and originally published by Houghton Mifflin the previous year in New York as The Tallest Tower); Bertrand Lemoine’s Gustave Eiffel, published in Paris in 1984; and Henri Loyrette’s Gustave Eiffel, published by Rizzoli in New York in 1985 (translated by Rachel and Susan Gomme), and originally published in 1985 as Eiffel – Un Ingénieur et son Oeuvre by the Office du Livre SA, Fribourg, Switzerland.

I am grateful to the staffs of a number of libraries, including the British Library and the Newspaper Library at Colindale; Glasgow University Library, in particular the Special Collections Department; the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh; and the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. I appreciate the hospitality and assistance of both the Librarian and the Archivist of the Institution of Civil Engineers in London; and I acknowledge the assistance of the Agence Roger-Viollet in Paris and the US Library of Congress in Washington in relation to illustrations. Iain Lewicki has tried to ensure that my translations from French have been reasonably accurate and consistent (not always straightforward given the use of technical terms and changes in idiom and style since the 1880s); and I thank Michel Schepens for kindly agreeing the use of the image of a particularly fine film poster. I am grateful to M. Jean Alex Foret of La Société Nouvelle d’exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, who very kindly drew my attention to new information that has come to light concerning the elevator systems for the Tower. This has allowed corrections both to this new edition and to the official Eiffel Tower website. My wife Rose has as usual acted as a kindly critic, and Jaqueline Mitchell at Sutton has brought valuable editorial dispassion.

Introduction

Towered cities please us then, And the busy hum of men.

Milton, L’Allegro 1.117

The urge to build towers is as old as man, and has produced an extraordinary range of structures, spectacularly diverse in both design and purpose. This compulsion to build to a height considerably greater than the structure’s width often manifested superiority over neighbour, rival or enemy. Towers have been erected in honour of deities or to gain closeness to them, to celebrate places of worship, and to proclaim spiritual or intellectual resolve. They have also been built to assert position, power, wealth and prestige, to affirm cultural dominance or to intimidate. Towers with such symbolic purposes usually had little strictly practical use, while those with a demonstrable practical purpose, such as the defensive watch-tower, windmill or lighthouse, have generally been relatively insignificant. Often, seen from today’s perspective, the original purpose is, if not lost, then blurred by our willingness to admire the after-effect. This is true of the Tuscan hill town of San Gimignano in Italy, where in the fourteenth century feuding families built over seventy successively higher towers to demonstrate their superiority; today, the result of tribal display is admired by visitors for its unique ‘townscape effect’.

The oldest man-made towers, on royal castles near the Egypt–Nubia border, may be 5,000 years old, and Sardinia is reckoned to have had over 7,000 nuraghi, or round stone towers dating from 1,500 BC (of which 300 remain).1 The ziggurat mountain dwellings of ancient Sumaria, which developed as stepped, manmade, pyramid-shaped structures surmounted by religious temples reaching for the gods, began a tradition that lasted for thousands of years. The name that best survives is probably the Tower of Babel, which was built on the ruins of earlier towers in the sixth century BC at Babylon, in the fertile valley between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). A few ancient written references and rather more archaeological evidence together prove the existence of a seven-storey tower of baked, brilliant-blue enamelled brick which did not conform to the ‘greater height than width’ definition – each side appears to have been about 300ft in length, approximately equalling its supposed height.

The story of the Tower of Babel has come to us (and been mightily recycled) from the biblical tradition, in which a jealous Old Testament God reacts against the arrogance of its collaborating builders:

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men had builded. And the Lord said, ‘Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’

(Genesis 11: 5–7)

Gustave Eiffel is a national hero in France but is perhaps uniquely remembered in Britain and elsewhere for his famous iron tower, which has survived long beyond its expected twenty years and has become possibly the world’s most recognised structure. This extraordinary 986ft tower was deliberately built for Paris’s Exposition Universelle of 1889, to be the tallest building in the world at a time when national self-worth was being energetically driven by a series of great international exhibitions. However, before Eiffel had riveted his first two pieces of iron together at the Champ de Mars, he and his proposed tower were publicly pilloried in what became known as the Artists’ Protest, when the intellectual elite combined to pour scorn on his proposal. The great battle of Art versus Industry – a battle intended to be annulled by the very concept of the international exhibition – became focused on the tower. However, the impetus behind the 1889 exhibition was enough to forestall the protest, and Eiffel, who had taken personal financial responsibility for the entire 8-million-franc project, proceeded to build what has become perhaps the most iconic structure in the world.

Eiffel was already a supreme exponent of the new ‘art’ of engineering design and construction in iron. ‘Le magicien du fer’ had an international reputation, for bridge-building in particular. He had constructed iron bridges, great and small, all over Europe, Russia and the Far East; other iron structures – railway stations, churches and all manner of industrial buildings – had been designed and built for locations in Peru, Bolivia, the Philippines and Algeria. Another of his more unusual achievements was his design and construction of the hidden, internal iron skeleton of Frédéric Bartholdi’s famous 155ft Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, which stands on a 150ft-high plinth on Bedloe’s Island at the entrance to New York harbour. Eiffel’s own favourite project had been a huge, innovative floating and rotating dome for the observatory at Nice; this was achieved in collaboration with Charles Garnier, the designer of the classically ornate Paris Opera, who would become his most bitter opponent in the battle of Art versus Industry, or as it became known, ‘stone versus iron’.

Yet, as he was beginning his prodigious efforts on his great tower, Eiffel became ensnared in what was to become the greatest political and financial scandal in French history. In 1880, public subscription was opened in Paris for shares in the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique. The elderly retired diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps was planning to repeat his famous success in leading the construction of the Suez Canal by excavating a 45-mile ship canal across the narrow isthmus of Panama. Regrettably little attention was given to the catastrophic experiences of the Scottish adventurers who had tried to secure a trading settlement in that unforgiving, disease-ridden landscape 200 years before; the Darien disaster should have been a prophetic warning. The canal was expected to become a great triumph of French engineering and project administration, but it ended in total failure, with 20,000 men dead (mostly of yellow fever and malaria), and almost one and a half billion francs (250 million dollars) lost.

Gustave Eiffel had been opposed to the original plan to construct a sea-level canal without locks, and it was only much later, when constructional, financial and political setbacks threatened the project, that Ferdinand de Lesseps persuaded Eiffel to design and construct a series of ten locks for a revised project. Within a year, matters had deteriorated significantly, and attempts to raise ever-greater sums of money to keep the project alive collapsed. The company was dissolved, and although Eiffel had a signed and ratified agreement with the liquidator that clarified and agreed the limits of his financial liability, he was sucked into the rapidly escalating scandal. In the midst of an erupting political backlash, during which the future prime minister Georges Clemenceau fought a duel with pistols, Gustave Eiffel was charged with breach of trust and swindling. Found guilty, he was fined and sentenced to two years in prison. Although this verdict was to become notorious, and the sentence was later quashed by the French Supreme Court, Gustave Eiffel was deeply hurt by the experience, feeling that his public reputation had been tarnished, by association if not directly. He resigned his position with his own company and never built another structure during the rest of his life; but this extremely wealthy, restlessly inquisitive man did not retreat into secure retirement; he reinvented himself. He had always insisted that his great tower was not simply a temporary, frivolous side-show for the 1889 Exhibition, but a structure of great practical value. He now decided to put it to use as a scientific instrument in his new life as a theoretical and practical scientist.

He immediately began a series of experiments on the wind resistance of falling bodies, employing equipment he himself designed. These experiments measured the velocities of specially-produced instruments in free-fall from the top of the tower. Trials were also conducted in the earliest radio transmissions, between the tower and the Pantheon; and by establishing a series of meteorological stations throughout France, he built the scientific basis on which the future of French meteorology would operate. His work on meteorology and air resistance was extended into the new science of aerodynamics, and Eiffel built a pioneering wind tunnel at the Champ de Mars.

The Eiffel Tower remained the tallest building in the world until 1930, when the superb art deco Chrysler Building was erected in New York. The skyscraper race was under way; within a year the Empire State Building had taken the title. The scramble to join the sky bandwagon became intense, and the only question that now mattered was, ‘how high can we go?’ Many of the proposals never made it further than the frothy publicity launch party, as designers and developers raced to join the frantic new game. In the autumn of 2003 the tallest building in the world became ‘Taipei 101’, at 1,667ft. Many of the world’s tallest buildings are either in, or planned for, the Far East, and there are proposals for buildings reaching to four times the height of the Eiffel Tower in India and Tokyo, while further ‘conceptual’ plans exist for a 2-mile-high sky city of 500 floors. Although ideas for such seemingly impossibly high buildings seem distinctly of our time, the concept for the first mile-high building came as long ago as 1956, when the visionary American architect Frank Lloyd Wright proposed such a building for Chicago. Even the atrocity that destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York in 2001 has not dulled the age-old desire to build higher than anyone else. Techniques will improve and new materials will be devised, and the obsession, it seems, continues.

This book not only gives an account of an individual of international importance (who is perhaps much less well-known in Britain than ought to be the case), but aims to set him within the turbulent and exciting times that Europe, and France in particular, were experiencing during his life. As a graduating student he stepped into a world that, through the establishment of the series of great international exhibitions, was trying to foster international brotherhood and to unite the seemingly irreconcilable cultures of Art and Industry. At a time when France regarded her sense of taste and style as her greatest and most important contribution to international intercourse, Eiffel embraced that idea wholeheartedly. Yet in his most iconic, innovative work he was bitterly accused of exacerbating wounds by the self-appointed cliques who wanted to hold on to their perceived right to dictate the cultural landscape. Eiffel’s later involvement in France’s most prestigious international demonstration of her engineering prowess – which turned into her biggest political and financial scandal – and his subsequent reinvention of himself are nothing less than startling features in the story of one of Europe’s most brilliant and enduring champions.

ONE

Beginnings

Gustave Eiffel’s family name, now so intimately associated with everything French, was Germanic rather than French in origin. In the early eighteenth century his great-great-grandfather, Jean-René Boenickhausen, came from the village of Marmagen in Westphalia, 37 miles south of Cologne; he settled in Paris and for convenience adopted the surname Eiffel, after the name of his native region of Eifel. (Legally, the family remained Boenickhausen-Eiffel until 1880, when Gustave Eiffel took action in court in Dijon to annul the German prefix.) Jean-René made a good marriage in 1711 with Marie Lideriz, the daughter of his landlord, and became a forester; he died only eleven years later, at Saint-Valérie in Picardy, but his widow later remarried and eventually the children married into middle-class Parisian life, and the family prospered as master weavers and owners of a successful tapestry studio.1 Throughout his life, Gustave Eiffel collected many examples of fine eighteenth-century tapestries and took considerable pride in his family’s mastery of the traditions of a vocation that became recognised as characteristic of the continuing French expertise in fine arts and crafts:

The tapestry weaver’s profession was an elite trade; it has left us, in that delicate branch of the art of furnishing, delightful patterns which we admire and still copy today as one of the most precious products of French taste. The weavers of that period, one of the most brilliant in the 18th century, were true artists.2

The family craft of tapestry-weaving came to an end with Gustave’s father, Alexandre, who in 1811 at the age of sixteen rejected craftsmanship in favour of a military career in Napoleon Bonaparte’s imperial army. This was a time when France consisted of 130 separate administrative regions, overseeing half of Europe. Alexandre saw service in Italy, and during the period when he taught at a military school at Saumur he wrote several books on military affairs. In November 1824, when he was stationed at Dijon, he married Catherine-Mélanie Moneuse, the daughter of a timber merchant. Catherine Eiffel was totally different in character from Alexandre. Throughout their marriage she remained business-orientated, and was largely responsible for the family’s financial success and prosperity. Alexandre was a learned man who read Greek and Latin and had a spirited, ironic, humanistic outlook on life; in one account he was compared in character to Charles Dickens.3 He had already left the army and become a civil administrator in the préfecture, or local government department, by the time their first child and only son, Alexandre Gustave, was born on 15 December 1832; his two sisters, Marie and Laure, were born in 1834 and 1836 respectively.

Dijon, the ancient capital of Burgundy, situated at the confluence of the Rivers Suzon and Ouche, lies some 200 miles south-east of Paris. Long recognised as one of France’s great wine-producing centres, Dijon is now often associated with the production of mustard, vinegar and chocolate. However, its history is closely associated with the duchy founded in 1015 by Robert, Duke of Burgundy, when court patronage attracted the best of French architects, musicians and artists. In the eighteenth century, the city was the centre of French intellectual life, but by the time Alexandre was born in the nineteenth century, the coming of the railways had opened up the area and it had become an important centre of the transport, mineral and related heavy industries.

Gustave’s mother decided to increase her commercial commitments after the birth of her son. She had continued a charcoal business begun by her parents, but now took up the opportunity to become the principal distributor of coal from the mines at Epinac in Saône-et-Loire, and later those at Saint-Eloy near Commentry. Blast furnaces had recently been established in the surrounding area, and coal was much in demand in preference to the charcoal of earlier years. Le Canal de Bourgogne had been completed in the year of Gustave’s birth, and related industrial expansion required considerable movements of massive quantities of coal. Linking the Atlantic with the Mediterranean via the Rivers Yonne and Saône, the 150-mile Burgundy Canal was a major factor in that industrial prosperity. Madame Eiffel appears to have had considerable business acumen, and although her commitment to these commercial activities meant that Gustave lived for much of his childhood with his blind grandmother in Dijon, his mother was very close to her son and had considerable influence over him until her death. Although she was a spirited and strong-willed woman whose authority in business affairs was widely recognised, she did not dominate her family; to both parents, their children were of paramount importance. Gustave later paid homage to his parents’ fortitude and commitment:

Right at the canal port she set up large coal depots, which were regularly restocked by a succession of overland deliveries. A great bustle pervaded these depots, and my father soon had to give up his place in the Préfecture to join my mother, alongside whom his time was more usefully spent. My young imagination was deeply impressed by their strenuous labour to expedite the unloading of ships, and the loading of carts, whatever the weather, which obliged them to leave the little house they lived in, on the very bank of the canal, at daybreak and which did not stop until after nightfall.4

By 1843 the family had become wealthy, but some poor investments led Catherine to decide to close the coal business, a profitable asset that sold for a substantial sum. Keeping some savings in the charcoal and steel industries, they made new investments in the brewery of Edouard Régneau and took up residence as tenants in a small eighteenth-century château, where they lived for the next twenty years. Despite the Eiffels’ prosperity, they were regarded as somewhat inferior incomers by the patrician families who constituted the influential layer of Dijon society. Even their solid Parisian background did not protect them from the insular snobbery that was fundamental to the local social order. (Much later, Gustave was to attempt a marriage with the daughter of a Bordeaux family, but the union was condemned by the girl’s parents, who were insulting about the standing in ‘society’ of the Eiffel family. Even the intervention of a Dijon attorney failed to substantiate the Eiffels’ good middle-class reputation.) These humiliations bypassed Gustave the child, however, and he led a happy if quiet, provincial childhood, which he later recalled with affection as providing him with ‘much sharper memories than of other times of my life’.5

The part of his childhood that Gustave did not enjoy was school, which left him with ‘the most wretched memories’. He was apparently an undistinguished pupil for most of these years, and complained of boredom and of having his time wasted in the smelly, cold schoolrooms of the Lycée Royal, where he was compelled to learn useless lessons by heart.6 He was rescued in his last two years at school by two teachers, M. Desjardin and M. Clémencet, who taught him history and literature respectively. They persuaded the young Eiffel to work hard enough to make up for a wasted year, and he was eventually successful in taking baccalauréats in science and humanities, enabling him to attend the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris as a preparation for going on to further study at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique.

There were compensations for an imaginative child in his nearby surroundings: he discovered workshops, a contractor’s depot, an eccentric scholar whom he was unable properly to characterise as either alchemist or sorcerer, and two grand houses inhabited by people who would not speak to him or any of his family.7 One of his great pleasures in these years was in forming a close relationship with his uncle, the rather fierce Jean-Baptiste Mollerat, who lived near his grandmother, and whom he later regarded as a second father. Mollerat, a determined anti-monarchist who continually assured the boy that ‘All kings are rascals!’ had suffered a deep disappointment as a young man. He had fallen for a young woman whose parents disapproved of him; nevertheless, they swore allegiance to each other, and Jean-Baptiste went to America to seek his fortune. When he returned, he discovered that the girl had married someone else. He drowned his sorrows in the study of chemistry, and it was only years later that he married a sister of Gustave’s mother. Mollerat devised a process for the distillation of vinegar and wood spirits, and opened a large factory at Pouilly-sur-Saône, near Dijon. As well as the informal education he obtained from his uncle, Eiffel also benefited from a friendship with one of his uncle’s friends, Michel Perret, a well-known chemist who owned mineral mines near Lyons. Perret engaged him in philosophical and theological discussion and encouraged Gustave to accompany him to his underground caverns, which produced copper minerals used in the manufacture of sulphuric acid. Perret had a virtual monopoly of this process in France, and happily encouraged the youth to learn as much as he wished, not only about industrial chemistry, but of ‘extraordinary things such as mesmerism, which he practised on his servant, or philosophical themes such as theological arguments or the theories of Saint-Simon’.8 The liberal ideas and attitudes he learned from Mollerat and Perret were of lasting influence and importance, and were probably significant to Gustave’s rejection of any kind of specifically religious ethos in his life; it was probably their influence that first gave the young Eiffel an insight into the practical value of mathematics.

In 1844, at the age of twelve, he visited Paris for the first time. He had been promised the trip by his father for some time, but in the end it was his mother alone who accompanied him. He was dazzled by the city, visiting the theatre and the opera, and travelling by train for the first time, to Versailles. Six years later, in October 1850, Alexandre finally accompanied his son to Paris, this time to enrol him for two years in the Collège Sainte-Barbe in the Latin Quarter. This time there was no overwhelming feeling of strangeness or alienation. On the contrary, he was impressed both by the vibrancy of the city and its resources and amenities, and a realisation that life in provincial Dijon was quite dull, at a time when revolution was in the Parisian air.

Two years earlier, King Louis-Philippe had been overthrown with the support of the masses (and escaped to England as ‘Mr Smith’), a republic declared, and a self-appointed committee affirmed as the provisional government. In November there was an election for the state presidency which was won by Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte). In December 1851, with political discord continuing and a right-wing move under way to restore the monarchy, Napoleon mounted a bloody coup d’état, dissolved the constitution, and became dictator. The Second Empire of Napoleon III was declared in 1852 and continued for the next eighteen years.

Within days of starting at Sainte-Barbe, Eiffel was nevertheless bored and homesick. Later, things seem to have settled, and he wrote to his mother that he had discovered the pleasures of dancing – and English girls, whom he thought were fun and much less reserved than French girls.9 He also enjoyed the cultural offerings of the city and maintained the interest in mesmerism that had been stirred by Michel Perret by attending seances from time to time.10 His schoolwork seems to have been quite indifferent. He wrote to his mother after his examinations that he was satisfied that he had done well to come 43rd out of 106: ‘You might not find this very good, but I think it isn’t bad. There are at least 25 or 30 who are in their third year at Sainte-Barbe; you understand that they will inevitably do best.’11

He tried to convince her that he would be happy to maintain that position throughout the year. That was not, however, the view of his teachers; in their opinion he had failed. He was less concerned about this than was his family, possibly because he was beginning to realise that his capabilities lay in practical rather than academic fields. The school was managed on very strict lines, which may well have been best for everyone, given that, during Gustave’s time there, the coup d’état which brought Napoleon to power raged around the city and was witnessed by him and his fellow pupils:

From two till five o’clock we heard the sound of roaring cannon-fire; that was truly sinister. At a given signal everybody stopped and listened and in the general silence we could hear the distant muted sound of cannon-fire; it was frightening. M. Blanchet came to tell me that there were many killed yesterday. In our area, it didn’t amount to much, as the district is disarmed; nevertheless all the streets are occupied by soldiers. All night we heard their infernal racket; they have hacked down all the wooden boards around the Pantheon and set huge fires in the middle of the street. Yesterday they were wild with drink, singing disgusting songs all night, to my deep sadness.12

In his second year he felt sure that he had performed well enough in his examinations to obtain the necessary certificate allowing him to enter the Ecole Polytechnique, but there was apparently a dispute among the examiners over his performance, and he was made to face them in an additional interview.13 It appears that petty squabbles among the examiners prevailed, and he succeeded only in obtaining passes sufficient for the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures (the state school of civil engineering), regarded as more vocational than the influential Polytechnique that had been his original goal. Instead of joining the sons of the bourgeoisie in studying maths and science at the highest level, he decided – without any apparent family regret – to go to the equally admirable and rather more liberal Ecole Centrale.

This school had been established as a private institution in 1829 by Alphonse Lavallée, a businessman from Nantes, so that ‘the doctors of factories and mills’ could be better trained. Eiffel attended the school in its original location in rue de Thorigny in the Marais district of the city, and rented a room just off the Place des Vosges. The Hôtel Salé had been built in the mid-seventeenth century for a salt tax collector, and when the school moved to other premises to the south of Paris it became the Ecole des Métiers d’Art; the building in the Marais now houses the Musée Picasso.

In his youth, Eiffel developed a strong trait of character that was to have a profound influence throughout his life, and which would, in its turn, be of great comfort to him in his own old age: he realised the importance of his family relationships. He had a good rapport with his father, was especially close to his mother, and developed a warm-hearted, protective attitude to his two sisters. Marie was his favourite, and he was careful to satisfy himself that when she was courted by Armand Hussonmorel, a successful flour miller, she was making a decision that would ensure her future comfort and happiness. When Marie married in 1852, he wrote to his mother, asking her to tell Marie not to forget him. Likewise, when, two years later, Laure married Joseph Collin, a foundry manager, Gustave displayed deeply affectionate concern.

The French have long idolised Eiffel as ‘le magicien du fer’ and it is perhaps a surprise that his field of study had no connection whatsoever with metallurgy or engineering. He is generally described at this period as being a rather prim, timid and conventional youth who nevertheless had a modest charm, which he retained until his death at the age of ninety-one. His years at the Ecole Centrale seem to have been unremarkable, his work generally diligent and his progress steady. The work was onerous, quite different from what he had been used to at Sainte-Barbe, with only two days’ holiday in the year, and the discipline ferocious in effect and often petty in character. He had a particular weakness in technical drawing (a subject of some importance for someone who would become a construction engineer) achieving only 17 per cent on one occasion. He complained to his mother that, ‘je crois que le professeur me donne de mauvaises notes par habitude.’ (‘I think the teacher gives me bad marks out of habit’.)

In his second year, he was required to select a subject in which to specialise from a list including metallurgy, mechanics, civil engineering and chemistry. It seems astonishing, in view of his later achievements, that Eiffel chose to concentrate on chemistry. This appears to have been a wholly pragmatic decision resulting from the fact that Jean-Baptiste Mollerat, with no children of his own, had nominated Gustave as his successor in taking charge of the successful vinegar and industrial spirit plant at Pouilly-sur- Saône. His uncle’s political stance (he claimed the reputation of having been present at the guillotining of Robespierre) was at odds with the Bonapartist position of Gustave’s father, who had spent much of his life in a series of military appointments. This difference opened up into a bitter family quarrel when a young man of republican views began to court Gustave’s sister and Alexandre brought the affair to an end, provoking his uncle Jean-Baptiste to respond with hostility. The two branches of the family permanently divided and Gustave’s opportunity to take over the running of the vinegar factory disappeared. When his uncle died the following year, the factory was acquired by a niece, and almost immediately began to fail:

The plant from the Pouilly factory was scattered and sold like old scrap. All the buildings were demolished and the site given over to cultivation. So the plough was driven over this factory where the industrial genius of one man had created a source of wealth for the surrounding area as well as for himself.14

And, he might well have added, for Eiffel also. His hopes of an easy entry into a career in chemistry, for which he would be properly qualified, evaporated. He had been one of the best students in the subject, but luckily the Ecole Centrale did not allow total specialisation, preferring to produce students with a broad technical education. Eiffel completed work on a range of additional subjects, including the processing of soda, zinc and linen. In August 1855, during a visit to Paris by his sister Marie and her husband Armand, they were able to telegraph Madame Eiffel with the happy news that Gustave had received his diploma.

In a move that was to prove highly significant to his entire future, he asked his mother to buy him a permanent season ticket for that year’s Exposition Universelle. This second major international exhibition was ostensibly to demonstrate the superiority of France in material and cultural affairs and to promote international understanding and cooperation. It was allegedly the initiative of Napoleon III, designed to advance his own regime and to answer the success of Britain’s Great Exhibition of four years earlier. Who can say to what extent the 22-year-old with the rolled diploma under his arm may have been impressed by the structure of Barrault’s iron Palais de l’Industrie? He was one among many young men graduating from college who were ready to take on the world in any discipline, taking as their inspiration the exciting range of industrial and commercial activity generated by the exhibition.

Giving preliminary consideration to a new career in some aspect of metallurgy, Eiffel decided to take advice from his brother-in-law Joseph Collin, who managed the iron foundry at Châtillon-sur-Seine. The outcome was that, totally unprepared by any form of training, Eiffel became apprenticed to his brother-in-law on a voluntary, unpaid basis. He wrote to his mother, saying that he was happy with the move, but that he wanted to be sure it would only be for a limited period.15 He made considerable efforts to observe and learn as much of the technical, administrative and financial aspects of the iron-founding business as he could, but he also began to seek out the means of finding a permanent job. It is likely that his formidable, business-like mother, to whom he was still very close, was involved in this task, and that she sought out contacts in the mining and metallurgical industries with whom she had business dealings. In any case, Eiffel gathered whatever references and letters of introduction he could, and sought his future in a Paris that was reaping the many industrial and commercial benefits conferred on her by Napoleon III’s Exposition Universelle.

TWO

‘Iron, iron, nothing but iron’1

When Eiffel left college with his diploma at the age of twenty-two in 1855, he had already been in Paris for five years. However, during a short holiday in Switzerland with family and other friends, it emerged that he was in debt to his landlord to the extent of 800 francs. He had hoped to conceal the situation in the general family merriment and congratulation surrounding the award of his diploma, but his mother was incensed – less by the amount owed than by his duplicity in concealing it – and he was bluntly accused of letting money run through his fingers. Gustave confessed his wrongdoing with contrition in the mood of celebration for his sister Laure’s imminent wedding, the fault was forgiven and he returned to Paris. He had the season ticket for the Exposition Universelle that his mother had bought for him, and probably sated himself at the exhibition, appreciating the quality of the engineering exhibits in the huge iron Palais de l’Industrie. Nevertheless, he kept his arrangement to start work at the foundry under the supervision of his brother-in-law, although it is likely that he already knew that his future would lie in Paris.

The city which he now knew so well was in a state of high excitement, with the Exposition attracting visitors from across the country and around the world; public enthusiasm for such spectacles was now deep-seated. Although London’s Society of Arts had offered prizes for specimens of manufactured goods – particularly such ‘artistic’ items as tapestry, carpets and porcelain – as early as 1756, France was quicker off the mark in establishing a tradition of exhibitions. The marquis d’Avèze had opened up the Maison d’Orsay and its grounds in Paris to an exhibition of ‘a great many objects of taste and vertu’ in 1798. Later, modest expositions celebrating French art and industry were held on the Champ de Mars (the huge military parade-ground across the Seine from the Trocadero Gardens), in the quadrangle of the Louvre, the terrace of the Hôpital des Invalides, and the Place de la Concorde. By the time an exhibition was held on the Champs-Elysées in 1849, the number of exhibitors had reached four and a half thousand.

When Napoleon III, Emperor of France, decided to hold a universal exhibition in Paris in 1855, the public motive was to celebrate the forty years of peace since Waterloo and to stimulate material and cultural progress. However, among other items on the hidden agenda was the vital necessity to surpass the success of London’s Great Exhibition.2 The French had been mortified by the huge success of the London event – regarded as the first of the modern ‘world fairs’ – and needed to regain what they regarded as their superior position in the sphere of national self-regard. One French commissioner was icily succinct: ‘The brazen imitator England has stolen from us the idea of a universal exposition.’3 However, the concept was now widely accepted, not least politically, as a vital means of declaring national prowess. Almost every such event produced momentous ‘firsts’ in the introduction of new products of lasting impact: London in 1851 saw the introduction of the Colt revolver, the elevator first appeared in Dublin in 1853, the sewing machine and the first production of aluminium in Paris in 1855, the calculating machine in London in 1862, the telephone in Philadelphia in 1876, the Ferris Wheel in Chicago in 1893 and ‘moving pictures’ in Paris in 1900.

London’s 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations ‘for the purposes of exhibition, of competition and of encouragement’ was presided over by Prince Albert in the manner (according to his detractors) of the royal master toying with his plaything. Six million people passed through the huge iron gates, cast at Coalbrookdale, to visit 17,000 exhibits containing 100,000 products in Joseph Paxton’s spectacular iron-and-glass Crystal Palace at Hyde Park.4 The importance of this first international exhibition of manufactured products was hard to overstate. It paved the way for the worldwide promotion and development of many features of modern society, such as art and design, international trade, foreign relations and the blossoming new industry of tourism. Charlotte Brontë noted after her visit that ‘Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things’, although it is said that the exhibit that caught the public imagination more than anything else was James Nasmyth’s massive steam hammer. The exhibition also signalled to the public the synthesis of art and industry, as design came to be regarded as an increasingly important feature of the manufacturing process. The purely functional was fine, but the French in particular were demonstrating that the concept of good design could increase the value, desirability and the practical performance of products. What had previously been patronisingly referred to as ‘the mechanical arts’ were now to be called ‘the useful arts’. The Great Exhibition was also to become the model for the many international exhibitions that were promoted in the following century.

London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 was by far the biggest event of its kind, and Paxton’s central creation was almost 2,000 feet in length, covering 19 acres, excluding 217,000 square feet of galleries (the building was so huge and slender that the Astronomer Royal, Professor George Airey, declared that it would collapse). Nevertheless, the French were justifiably proud of their pre-eminence in fine art and in sophisticated industrial design and production. They regarded style as the quintessentially priceless aspect of French civilisation. It was such confidence that enabled their 1,740 exhibitors to threaten English dominance of the medal tables at the Crystal Palace, with porcelain, agricultural machinery, fine silks and furnishings, and examples of imaginative technology including a prototype submarine.

There was a prevailing sense of pacifist internationalism abroad, and the international exhibitions were expected to act as a potent social cement for the brotherhood of nations. The Art Journal’s Illustrated Catalogue of the Exhibition addressed this intention on its first page:

Whatever be the extent of the benefit which this great demonstration may confer upon the Industrial Arts of the world, it cannot fail to soften, if not eradicate altogether, the prejudices and animosities which have so long retarded the happiness of nations; and to promote those feelings of ‘peace and goodwill’ which are among the surest antecedents of their prosperity; a peace, which Shakespeare has told us,

Is of the nature of a conquest; For then both parties nobly are subdued, And neither party loses.5

Napoleon III had already begun to change Paris. He came to power after the successful coup d’état of 1851 (his earlier attempts to gain control had seen him exiled to America and imprisoned in France). A man of liberal social conviction with a well-developed concern for people’s living conditions, he soon embarked on a renewal of the city. In the thirty years from 1852 came new sewers, water pipes, bridges, railways and other public works; and, with dramatic vision, the financier, town planner and préfet of Paris, Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, swept away miles of chaotic slums and began planning and constructing grand new boulevards and public monuments, creating the superb classical townscapes that endure today. In his promotion of the Exposition Universelle, Napoleon espoused all the fine sentiments and values of the ‘brazen imitator’. In his inaugural speech he was to proclaim that ‘With great happiness I hereby open this temple of peace that brings together all peoples in a spirit of concord.’6 However, some things in the world had changed. The fierce struggle with Russia was raging in the Crimea, and Britain, France, Italy and Turkey were fighting a very dirty war. Consequently, imperial Russia was not to be represented, although individuals were (and, curiously, Russian prisoners of war were allowed to attend).7

The entire exhibition would be contained inside one spectacular building, the Palais de l’Industrie, to be constructed on the Grand Carré de Marigny, a promenade beside the then relatively undeveloped Champs-Elysées. The chosen architect and engineer, Jean-Marie Viel and Alexandre Barrault, collaborated on a scheme with distinct echoes of the Crystal Palace. The light, iron-framed building with reinforced glass canopies (the Emperor’s ‘temple of peace’) was 820ft in length by 354ft wide and 115ft high. Viel is said to have taken as his inspiration the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève by Henri Labrouste, and planned a similar structure displaying the benefits of combining iron behind a masonry façade. However, cost considerations meant that the masonry was severely reduced and had to be braced with additional iron columns. Barrault observed that ‘. . . all complicated arrangements are unattractive and denote inaccuracy of construction or poor distribution of material.’8 Some critics thought, however, that Barrault had lost his nerve.

The emergence of iron as an architectural material in the Palace of Industry was by no means universally popular. The radical writer Octave Mirabeau described the blight of its domination of the Champs-Elysées as like ‘an ox trampling through a rose garden’; and Charles Garnier, the celebrated architect of the equally celebrated opera house, was similarly scathing when the Palais was demolished to make way for the exhibition of 1900 – he said then that no architect of note in Paris wanted its retention. Under construction, the Palais looked like being a disaster. Despite being erected at considerable speed, it was still unfinished on the opening day; it was too small to house comfortably the 21,000 exhibitors, and was very badly ventilated; two substantial additional buildings had to be hurriedly erected at the last minute. The exhibition was half as big again as London’s Great Exhibition, and cost twice as much, although attendance was significantly lower than that at the Crystal Palace.

Queen Victoria came to Paris herself and was received with great enthusiasm. After centuries of bitter antagonism (if not outright war) between the two countries, this constituted an extraordinary and passionately celebrated peace treaty. Both France and Britain celebrated their new brotherhood by displaying for the first time the produce and cultures of their respective colonial empires. The Exposition Universelle again proved that Britain was the leader in heavy industry and basic processing and manufacture, while the French excelled in design and quality of finish. Given the intention to devote considerable space to painting and sculpture, it was the French exhibits in the fine-arts building that attracted the most visitors and the greatest critical notice.9

The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1855 was not, however, one which gave undue significance to works of art of interest to the wealthy, or machinery and technologies for the attention only of bloated businessmen. There were also thousands of cheaper goods designed to appeal to the meritorious and democratic French concept of bon marché promoted by the man who would devise the department store, Aristide Boucicaut. For the first time, at the insistence of Napoleon III, all goods had a price label; conforming to the idea of a popular market place, every item could either be bought or ordered on the spot. Napoleon insisted in his final Rapport sur l’Exposition that all such future exhibitions should be committed to the egalitarian concept of ‘plus d’aissance au profit du plus grand nombre’ (‘the greatest good for the greatest number’).10 To this democratic end, considerable efforts were made to encourage mass popular attendance, and the original entrance charge was reduced from five to two francs; special trains were organised in order that not only Parisians, but people from the provinces and the wider countryside could attend. There were critics, however, who condemned the idolisation of consumerism, and regretted the fact that the population was being encouraged to pay money to gawp at diamonds. In a spectacular event in the final days of the exhibition, Hector Berlioz, the great French composer who ironically had a bigger reputation in Britain, Germany and Russia than in his native country, conducted a magnificent performance of his cantata L’Imperiale, his Symphonie triomphale and his Te Deum.

After Gustave Eiffel’s broad education at the Ecole Centrale, and the brief but welcome flirtation with the iron industry, thanks to his brother-in-law, he was anxious to discover precisely where his mainstream in life would lie. As it happened – and it may have been nothing more or less than luck – he landed right in the heart of the most dynamic industry not only in France but throughout Europe – the railways. Since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, the railways had been the driving force behind industry, transport and employment, and not the least of the changes they brought about was the possibility of mass transport for people who had hitherto often never ventured further than the village or township of their childhood. Main lines had been constructed from Paris to the industrial north in the early 1840s, and in the five years after 1852, 8,000 miles of track were laid and six major French companies were established. However, it had been the Scottish and English engineers William Mackenzie and Thomas Brassey who had constructed the important line from Paris to Le Havre in 1846. Crucially, these burgeoning railway lines were to need an architectural and engineering infrastructure, in particular, bridges.

On 10 February 1856, Gustave Eiffel called at the workshops of Charles Nepveu at 36 rue de la Bienfaisance in the Quartier Saint-Augustin, in the 8th arrondissement near the Gare St-Lazare in the north of Paris (Nepveu also owned a separate railway-carriage-building workshop a little further north, at Clichy). This seems to have been essentially a chance visit by Eiffel to one of several potential employers, with no particular expectation on his part; it was to prove momentous. Although nowadays Saint-Augustin is an unremarkable part of the inner city, it had a reputation at that time as a run-down area inhabited by transient, impoverished incomers, and was referred to as ‘Little Poland’. However, as a member of the French Society of Civil Engineers (of which, much later, Eiffel would become president), Nepveu was a well-known and highly respected figure in the business of designing and constructing steam railway engines, rolling stock and track. He offered Eiffel the job of private secretary at a salary of 150 francs per month, with the opportunity to study a number of specific issues, such as the building of foundations in rivers.11 The two men seem to have struck an immediate rapport, and Eiffel responded with enthusiasm, renting a room in a large house nearby.

Initially left to his own devices, he was given complete freedom to make himself familiar with all the company’s activities, which he quickly realised were considerable. Soon after starting with Nepveu, he described in a letter to his mother a routine that involved his still being at work until late at night, usually accompanying the tireless Nepveu.12 Eiffel himself worked hard and diligently, and on Sundays he took private lessons in economics at the Ecole des Mines (School of Mines). He clearly thought that with Nepveu he had found the ideal position in which to learn everything that would fit him out for his working life. But very soon, things went wrong. Nepveu seems to have been rather highly strung, and certainly less capable as a businessman than as an engineer. The previous year he had exhibited a new steam locomotive of his own design, and the unsuccessful project had considerably drained his barely sufficient finances. One day in May, he unaccountably didn’t appear at his office; invoices were unpaid and the business was insolvent. Eiffel’s letters reveal his concern that Nepveu might have killed himself, as he had left the previous day without any money, carrying only his papers and pistols.13

Nepveu had made no arrangements to warn or protect his workers against such an adverse situation. However, fifteen days after his dramatic disappearance, he was brought back from Geneva by Professor Emile Trélat, of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, a close friend to whom he had previously introduced Eiffel. Although Eiffel received no explanation of the disappearance, which seems to have been regarded as due to a temporary nervous breakdown, he and Nepveu greeted each other happily. The two men needed each other, in different ways, and Eiffel remained with Nepveu, unpaid, while the business was formally wound up, writing to his mother to assure her that his employer remained a man of substance with good prospects for the future. Nepveu for his part found his protégé a good position in August 1856 with La Compagnie des Chemins de Fer de l’Ouest. This company, owned by the Pereire brothers, financial wizards taking daring advantage of the new climate brought about by Louis-Napoleon, owned the Gare St-Lazare and many of the principal French railway lines. They were followers of the theories of the French socialist-philosopher Claude Henri de Ronvroy, the comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825). He is regarded as the founder of French socialism, and promoted the organisation of a society led by science and industry – what he called the ‘new Christianity’. The brothers Pereire were also involved in establishing railways in Spain, Austria and Russia, and in promoting a multitude of other industrial activities throughout France, all based on their allegiance to the new democratic concepts of Saint-Simon.14

Eiffel was paid 125 francs a month and immediately given responsible duties to carry out. He had the opportunity to work with the company’s highly respected chief engineer, Eugène Flachat, who had just completed a huge extension to the Gare St-Lazare15; he had also completed the first sheet-iron bridge in France, at Clichy, modelled on the principles recently established by Robert Stephenson on the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Straits, linking Anglesey to north-west Wales. Eiffel later wrote of his debt to Flachat, who had pioneered the use of sheet iron fixed by rivets, rather than pins and bolts as had been favoured until 1850:

In France, the introduction of sheet-metal bridges dates from the bridges at Clichy and d’Asnières on the Saint-Germain Railway in 1852. It is to M. Flachat, at that time engineer-in-chief of the railway, that are attributed the first iron constructions, which were later applied on a very large scale in the building of the railways of southern France.16

After the erection by Baltard of Les Halles in the mid-1850s – the first time in France that a building prominently proclaimed its mode of construction (and it was the new material) – iron began to be considered for a wide range of structures in France, from railway stations to markets, halls, factories and pavilions. Although iron had been used for a few arched bridges, there was not yet an established tradition of using iron in bridge-building. France’s use of iron in structural engineering was delayed by cost considerations, and the fact that most of the progress in iron-founding, and in techniques such as riveting and plate-rolling, was being made and patented in England, which in any case had a much longer history of iron-working. Gustave Eiffel himself often acknowledged the fact that England was far ahead of France in the use of iron:

Sheet-metal bridges, that is to say, bridges composed of laminated iron in which the pieces are assembled by means of rivets, did not make their appearance till well after cast-iron bridges and suspension bridges, and it is again in England, the land of metal, that we must look for their origin.17

Eiffel’s own first-ever design, for a small, 72ft cast- and sheet-iron bridge for the Saint-Germain Railway, was soon finished and accepted, and there were hopes that the company would win the contract for a big new bridge at Bordeaux. Nepveu, meanwhile, was trying to arrange the sale of his own company to the Compagnie Belge de Matériels de Chemins de Fer, directed by the Pauwels family of industrialists. He was also trying to position himself for what he knew would be an important construction contract for the bridge across the Garonne river at Bordeaux. As it happened, the outcome could hardly have been better for either Nepveu or Eiffel. The Belgian company paid handsomely for the Paris and Clichy workshops, which were renamed la Compagnie de matériels de Chemins de Fer. Nepveu was retained in charge and arranged that, within the new French branch of the business, Eiffel should have a senior position in his own right, rather than function as a possibly short-lived personal assistant with insecure tenure of office; he was appointed head of research at the main Paris workshops at a salary of 250 francs per month. This promotion delighted Eiffel; for the first time he had a permanent, responsible position in a large, successful company, which had no financial restraints or impediments. He wrote to his mother of being wary of becoming involved in another situation in which he might find himself suddenly pushed out on the street again.18 Although he was close to Nepveu, and had great respect for his enterprise and imagination, he was relieved to be free from the inevitable acquiescence which he owed to his mentor.19