December 27, 2023 is the 100th anniversary of the death of Gustave Eiffel, from France to the world, from ** to the architectural community set off a wave of commemoration of the Eiffel Tower named after him, to commemorate the 700 architectural works he left in 30 countries, to commemorate the change that this engineer has brought to the world with advanced technology and ingenuity in the era of the industrial revolution.
He was involved in the Statue of Liberty project.
Behind Eiffel's personal success is the story of a German immigrant family that successfully took root in France. At the end of the 17th century, Guillaume-Henri Bonickhausen, Eiffel's ancestor, came from a small town in Germany to Paris, France, in search of opportunities. German surnames are difficult to pronounce for the French, and the grandparents wanted to further integrate into France, so they added the French-friendly Eiffel to the surname.
Born in December 1832, Eiffel was initially interested not in architecture, but in chemistry. Since he was a child, he believed that science has the power to change the world, and he was admitted to the ** École Polytechnique in Paris. His relatives were entrepreneurs in the French chemical industry at the time, and they planned to train Eiffel to be a ** person. But then conflicts arose within the Eiffel family, making it unlikely that Eiffel would continue to run his relative's chemical business. At the 1855 Universal Exhibition in Paris, the new steel and glass architecture impressed the young Eiffel and ignited his passion for changing the world with architecture.
After graduating, Eiffel worked for a railway company, and his first independent work was the Garonne railway bridge in Bordeaux, where his design successfully solved the problem of the bridge piles being subjected to the impact of the river, and also saved construction costs and construction time. This project gave a spotlight on Eiffel's abilities and brought him fame. Eiffel then founded his own construction company to undertake projects focusing on railway bridge projects, such as the Maria Pia Bridge in Porto, Portugal, and the Galabi Viaduct in the south of France. Eiffel's company is also involved in other projects, such as the manufacture of the metal skeleton of the Statue of Liberty given by France to the United States. While traveling to the United States to attend the inauguration of the Statue of Liberty, Eiffel met a French parliamentarian who was in charge of preparing for the 1889 Paris World's Fair with the intention of creating an iconic building for the fair.
To build the world's tallest building.
France wants to build the tallest building in the world. On the one hand, it was the "tradition" of the World Expo at that time, where industrial countries displayed their products and technologies, and iconic mega-buildings were indispensable. For example, Britain built the Crystal Palace for the 1851 International Exhibition in London, a building made of largely glass and metal that showcases Victorian British industrial technology. On the other hand, it is also related to the political situation in France and abroad, when the internal political situation in the French Third Republic was not stable, and the opposition of royalists and clerical activists occupied many seats in the French parliament. From a diplomatic point of view, the Third Republic used the 1889 World's Fair to commemorate the French Revolution, which annoyed the European monarchies of the time. France** urgently needed to prove its revival and institutional stability at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, and a world-tall building would provide the best illustration of this at the level of technological and industrial development.
In the 19th century, many people proposed to build iron towers of more than 300 meters before Eiffel, but in practice it was not easy to challenge this building height. Before the Eiffel Tower was built, the world's tallest building was the Washington Monument in 1884, which was about 169 meters high and took 36 years to build. Before the monument was inaugurated, the world's tallest building was the Cologne Cathedral in Germany, which was built in the 13th century. Eventually, the 1889 Paris Exposition put forward a request for a design tender: "To study the possibility of building an iron tower on the Champs-Élysées in Mars, with a square base, a base of 125 meters on the sides, and a height of 300 .......""The height of the tower is set at 300 meters, which has a double consideration, in terms of external publicity, 300 meters is about 1,000 feet, and the name of the thousand-foot tower is more shocking and spreading. In terms of French domestic affairs, the Basilica of the Sacré-Coeur on the heights of Montmartre was nearing completion, or the tallest building in Paris, and the French secularists and republicans wanted to build a more secular building in Paris to balance their influence.
Two years, two months and five days.
Some people expressed concern about the safety of the tower, believing that such a tall building could not withstand the wind, which would cause workers to dizzy and cause accidents, and nearby residents worried about the fall of construction tools and heavy metal parts, and even feared that the entire tower would collapse in a storm. There are also some critics of the Eiffel Tower's aesthetics, including well-known writers and artists such as Alexandre Dumas and Maupassant, and the content of the criticism is varied - "useless, deformed Eiffel Tower......Mercenary Americans don't want "hollow candelabra" "barbecue grills with funnels." In the face of these vitriolic criticisms, Eiffel hit back with no measure: "I believe that this tower will have its own beauty. Just because we're engineers, someone thinks we don't care about the beauty of architecture and strive to create something elegant, sturdy and durable?But Eiffel knew that the best response was to finish the work on time and with quality. He chose to make the tower parts in a factory on the outskirts of Paris and transport them to the Seine to be assembled, saving a lot of time. After laying a solid foundation, Eiffel used two hydraulic jacks weighing 800 tons to install the base of the tower. Relying on strict engineering organization and advanced engineering technology, the 300-meter-high tower was completed in only two years, two months and five days. Two engineers from the Eiffel company were indebted, Maurice Kochlin and Emile Noujiye, who discussed the plan for the construction of the tower, and Kochlin drew up the first sketch of the tower.
On March 31, 1889, the tower was officially inaugurated and named after its builder, Eiffel. After the tower was completed, it received 2 million visitors in just 173 days. The Eiffel Tower, which has survived wind and rain and slander, has become one of the most recognizable World's Fair landmarks in the 19th century, and has become a symbol of Paris, France. (The author of this article is Yang Guang, an assistant researcher at the Institute of World History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences).