Gustave Eiffel

French engineer

• Born: December 15, 1832
• Birthplace: Dijon, France
• Died: December 27, 1923
• Place of death: Pris, France

A leading engineer of Europe’s “second” industrial age, Eiffel specialized in the manufacture and design of iron structures—from bridges, exposition halls, and water locks to public buildings and monuments. He supplied the armature required to support New York’s Statue of Liberty and erected one of France’s best-known icons, the Eiffel Tower. His later research on wind resistance and airflow contributed to the early development of aviation.

Early Life

Gustave Alexandre Eiffel (goo-stahv ah-lehks-ahn-druh eh-fehl) grew up in a provincial middle-class family in Dijon, France. One of his ancestors, Wilhelm Heinrich Johann Bönickhausen, had migrated there from Eifeldorf, a small village near Marmagen, Germany, during the early eighteenth century and became known to the French as Jean-René Bönickhausen-Eiffel. Because of later Franco-Germanic tensions, the name Bönickhausen was later conveniently omitted from family documents.

Gustave’s early life in Dijon was tranquil, happy, and secure. His parents, François Alexandre Eiffel (1795-1878) and Catherine Mélanie Moneuse (1799-1878), prospered as merchants in the nation’s flourishing coal industry before investing their savings in a local brewery. As a student at the neighborhood Lycée Royal of Dijon, Gustave found most of his classes boring but later admitted having acquired some useful knowledge there during his final two years. In 1850, he went to Paris and enrolled in preparatory courses at the Saint-Barbe College, hoping to gain admission to the highly competitive Polytechnic Institute. At the end of his second year, however, his performance on the qualifying examination fell short of the mark; as a result, he was steered into a more purely vocational track at the Central School of Arts and Manufacturing, where he graduated in 1855 with a diploma in engineering.

After a few months of in-work training at a foundry in Châtillon-sur-Seine, Eiffel found employment in Paris as a personal assistant to Charles Nepveu, a railway engineer with important connections in the industry. In December, 1856, Nepveu formed a limited partnership with a Belgian company specializing in railroad materials and secured a position for Eiffel as the director of research in its Paris factories.

Life’s Work

Eiffel’s first major project for the Belgian company was the construction in 1858-1860 of a five-hundred-meter bridge over the Garonne River at Bordeaux, a crucial link between the northern and southern railway networks. Upon its successful completion, he became chief engineer for the company’s railway division and received not only a substantial raise in salary but also a share in future projects. Between 1860 and 1861, he completed other railway bridges, notably at Bayonne on the river Nive, at Capdenac on the Lot, and at Floirac on the Dordogne, gaining financial stability and a solid reputation in the industry. Confident in his success, he married Marie Gaudelet (1845-1877) on July 8, 1862. His wife was the granddaughter of an established Dijon brewer. They later moved into a large house in northern Paris.

When an unstable market forced the Belgian company into bankruptcy, Eiffel took the initiative of securing contracts for the construction of railway stations in Toulouse and Agen (1864-1866), for the delivery of locomotives to Egypt (1864-1865), for miscellaneous bridges (1867 and later), and for exposition galleries at the Universal Exhibition of 1867. To meet the demands of these and future contracts, he established workshops at Levallois-Perret, a largely industrial zone in northern Paris, and, in 1868, founded G. Eiffel and Company in a limited partnership with a recent graduate of the École Centrale, Théophile Seyrig.

In addition to its many domestic ventures, G. Eiffel and Company obtained contracts for a number of international projects: bridges in Romania (1872), Bolivia (1873), Peru (1874), and Colombia (1874); floodgates for a dam in Russia (1874); and churches in Peru, Chile, and the Philippines (1875). A substantial portion of Eiffel’s financial success after the late 1870’s derived from the design and manufacture of modular bridges. They were cheap, versatile, and easy to erect; hundreds of such structures were employed not only in France and Western Europe, but throughout the world as well. Following Seyrig’s departure in 1879, the company was renamed several times but survived in one form or another for more than one hundred years.

Eiffel undertook many of his most dramatic and resourceful construction projects between 1875 and 1890. Innovative in their use of exposed metal structure and glass, the Nyugati railway station in Budapest, Hungary (1874-1877), and the central office of the Crédit Lyonnais in Paris, France (1881), stand out as models of architectural integrity. The Maria Pia Bridge over the Douro at Porto, Portugal (1877), with its 160-meter central span, was advertised during its construction as the world’s largest nonsuspension bridge; it later served as a model for the elegant Garabit Viaduct (1884) in the rugged Truyère Valley of France’s Massif Central. The Cubzac Bridge at Lilbourne, France (1884), although similar in manufacture to other linear, steel-lattice bridges, benefited from improved construction techniques such as the use of hydraulic jacks to ensure proper height and tension.

Eiffel also designed the internal support structure for Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty , which was shipped to the United States for assembly in 1885, and an ingenious revolving dome for the Observatory at Nice (1885-1886). The most remarkable engineering project of his career, however, was the three-hundred-meter-high Eiffel Tower (1886-1889), which was erected as a central attraction for the Universal Exposition of 1889. The exposition had been organized in Paris to commemorate the first centenary of the French Revolution, and the tower, the tallest in the world, was to symbolize France’s industrial success and the triumph of republican ideals. Despite public protests during its construction and calls for its dismantlement in 1903, Eiffel prevailed over his critics and the tower that bore his name became a permanent landmark in the French capital.

In 1893, following his indictment in connection with France’s Panama Canal project, Eiffel retired from the administration of his company and devoted himself increasingly to the study of aerodynamics. The research he presented in his book La Résistance de l’air et l’aviation, expériences effectuées au laboratoire du Champs-de-Mars (1910; The Resistance of Air and Aviation Experiments Conducted at the Champs-de-Mars Laboratory , 1913) drew international attention to his research and helped establish the science of aviation. He spent the final years of his life completing a Biographie industrielle et scientifique (industrial and scientific biography) that survives in original typescript (1922) at the Orsay Museum in Paris. Eiffel died in 1923 at the age of ninety-one.

Significance

Perhaps the single greatest icon of modern French culture, the Eiffel Tower has virtually overshadowed the engineer’s other noteworthy contributions to the history of nineteenth century engineering. By the time he began work on the tower, he had already acquired an international reputation for designing and building some of the world’s largest and most elegant bridges and viaducts. His designs and wrought iron found their way into a wide variety of projects: a synagogue at Rue des Tournelles, Paris (1867), the Bon Marché department store (1872), churches, railway stations, exposition halls, pavilions, gasworks, water locks, lighthouses, and observatories.

In contrast to the armature that Eiffel designed for the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower stands out as a work of pure form, free from constraints other than those imposed by nature and physics. As the twentieth century French critic Roland Barthes argued, the tower has for more than a century symbolized many things to many people—from modern hubris and bad taste to the victory of France’s republican ideals and the triumph of science and industry. Artists, poets, filmmakers, historians and philosophers have found inspiration in the tower’s bold design and its secret harmony.

Bibliography

Bermond, Daniel. Gustave Eiffel. Paris: Perrin, 2002. A comprehensive look at the architect’s career, including his successes and failures, in the French language.

Carmona, Michel. Eiffel. Paris: Fayard, 2002. Examines every major aspect of Eiffel’s life and work in historical context; written in French.

Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo. “Geometry/Labor = Volume/Mass?” October 106 (2003): 3-34. Journal article examining the importance of geometric design and empty space in Eiffel’s work on the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, and the French plans for a Panama canal; appropriate for both specialists and nonspecialists.

Harvie, David I. Eiffel: The Genius Who Reinvented Himself. Stroud, England: Sutton, 2004. A comprehensive survey of Eiffel’s life and his major contributions to engineering, architecture, and aeronautics; includes a discussion of the world’s tallest buildings following the September 11, 2001, destruction of the World Trade Center’s twin towers. The bibliography identifies major Web sites devoted to Eiffel.

Lemoine, Bertrand. Architecture in France, 1800-1900. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998. This illustrated survey of nineteenth century French architecture helps to situate Gustave Eiffel within a larger context; includes chapters on industrial architecture and civil engineering.

Loyrette, Henri. Gustave Eiffel. New York: Rizzoli, 1985. Illustrated, comprehensive survey of the man’s life and work; includes discussion of the Eiffel Tower’s representation in modern art; a standard reference for English-language readers.

Marrey, Bernard. The Extraordinary Life and Work of Monsieur Gustave Eiffel: The Engineer Who Built the Statue of Liberty, the Porto Bridge, the Nice Observatory, the Garabit Viaduct, the Panama Locks, the Eiffel Tower, etc. Paris: Graphite, 1984. An accurate survey for the general reader; includes illustrations but no bibliography.

Thompson, William. “’The Symbol of Paris’: Writing the Eiffel Tower.” French Review 73 (2000): 1130-1140. Examines symbolic interpretations of the Eiffel Tower, from Charles Garnier and Guy de Maupassant to Jean Cocteau and Roland Barthes.